Robert M. Morgenthau, who waged a war on crime for more than four decades as the chief federal prosecutor for Southern New York State and as Manhattan’s longest-serving district attorney, died July 21 in Manhattan. He was 99.

In an era of notorious Wall Street chicanery and often dangerous streets, Mr. Morgenthau was the bane of mobsters, crooked politicians and corporate greed; a public avenger to killers, rapists and drug dealers; and a confidant of mayors and governors. As district attorney, he presided over a battalion of 500 lawyers, a $75 million budget, and a torrent of cases every year, from stock manipulators and extortionists to murderers, muggers, wife beaters and sexual predators, supervising a total of 3.5 million cases over the years, including highly publicized trials, like those of the subway vigilante Bernard Goetz; the Central Park “preppy” killer, Robert Chambers; and John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2009, he ruminated on the night in 1944 when his Navy vessel went down with 47 of his shipmates. “I was swimming around without a life jacket,” he recalled. “I made a number of promises to the Almighty at a time when I didn’t have much bargaining power — that I would try to do something useful with my life.”

Artur Brauner, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who became one of Post-WWII Germany’s most prominent film producers, died July 7 in Berlin. He was 100.

The hundreds of films that Mr. Brauner produced included several with a Holocaust theme, He produced Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” set in Mussolini’s Italy, which won the Oscar for best foreign-language movie in 1972.

Even as he turned 100, Mr. Brauner was discussing scripts almost daily with his daughter Alice. “As soon as I am no longer around,” he said, “I can give up working.”

Martin Charnin, the Broadway lyricist and director who conceived of turning the comic strip “Little Orphan Annie” into “Annie,” the hit musical whose title character vowed that “the sun’ll come out tomorrow,” died July 6 in a hospital in White Plains, NY. He was 84.

“Annie” was by far the most successful venture of Mr. Charnin’s career, opening in April 1977 and running for 2,377 performances — almost six years. “Annie” went on to win seven Tony Awards in all, including for best musical, best score, and best book. Dorothy Loudon, who played Miss Hannigan, the villainous child-hating matron of the orphanage, won for best actress.

The show also spawned two Broadway revivals, two stage sequels, and two films. Mr. Charnin, who was nominated for a Tony for his direction, directed 42 touring productions of the original musical.

Eva Kor survived the sadistic pseudoscientific medical experiments carried out on twins at the Auschwitz death camp. She dedicated herself decades later to telling of the Holocaust horrors spawned by religious and racial hatred, while preaching the power of forgiveness as a means of healing from devastating trauma. Her father, mother and two older sisters, who had been separated from them upon the family’s arrival at Auschwitz, died there.

Ms. Kor took young people on annual summer tours of Auschwitz. While conducting a tour, she died on July 3 at 85 at a hotel in Krakow, Poland, near the site of the former death camp, The New York Times reported. It was there that she and her twin, Miriam, had been among some 1.500 sets of twins who were victims of experiments, including the injections of germs, overseen by the German doctor Josef Mengele. She told of Mengele’s genetics laboratory, where he had pursued the notion that studying twins could advance Hitler’s quest to produce an Aryan master race.

Her death was announced by the Candles Holocaust Museum and Education Center, which she had opened in 1995 in Terre Haute, IN. She had settled there in 1960 with her husband, Michael Kor, a fellow Holocaust survivor.

Michael R. Levitas, a journalist who won the prestigious George Polk Award in his 20s for a series on labor racketeering, and who held leading newsroom positions at The New York Times for decades, died June 29 at his home in New Marlborough, MA. He was 89.

Of particular interest to North Fork residents, Mr. Levitas wrote a profile of Robert David Lion Gardiner, the 16th lord of the 3,000-acre manor off the East End of Long Island known as Gardiners Island, which had been in the family for 11 generations. Accompanying the article was a brief note identifying himself as the author. With his tongue stuck firmly in his cheek, he wrote, “Michael Levitas is himself the lord of a manor, a heavily mortgaged summer place on Martha’s Vineyard that has been in the family for less than one generation.”

Peter Selz, who as a leading curator at the Museum of Modern Art staged wide-ranging exhibitions of Mark Rothko’s paintings and Auguste Rodin’s sculptures before leaving to become the founding director of the University Art Museum, Berkeley, died June 21 in Albany, CA. He was 100.

He was born to a prosperous Jewish family in Munich, Germany. His maternal grandfather, an art dealer, introduced him to art, taking him to local museums and galleries. “When he saw my response, he took me almost every week,” Mr. Selz said in an interview.

He joined the MOMA in 1958, leaving in 1964 for the position at Berkeley, then in its planning stages. It opened in 1970. He continued to teach modern art at the university until he retired in 1988.