Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor from the trials at Nuremberg that held Nazi death-squad leaders accountable for killing more than 1 million people in Eastern Europe during World War II, has died. He was 103.
(Bloomberg) — Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor from the trials at Nuremberg that held Nazi death-squad leaders accountable for killing more than 1 million people in Eastern Europe during World War II, has died. He was 103.
He died on April 7 in Boynton Beach, Florida, the Associated Press reported, citing St. John’s University law professor John Barrett, who runs a blog about the Nuremberg trials.
Ferencz “was relentless in his commitment to memory, history and justice,” Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, said in a statement.
At 27, the Romanian-born, New York-raised Ferencz led the case against the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the SS-led units that had murdered Jews, gypsies, disabled people and Soviet intellectuals from 1941 to 1943. With the help of Chief Counsel Telford Taylor, Ferencz prosecuted 22 defendants for crimes against humanity by detailing the horrors of Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” program, designed to annihilate all Jews in Europe.
Most survivors of the Nazi regime’s top leadership, including Hermann Goering, had already been convicted by an international court in 1946. Ferencz’s case was the ninth among 12 follow-up trials heard by a US military tribunal in Nuremberg, involving 177 lower-ranking accused war criminals.
The case, US v. Otto Ohlendorf et al., took place from September 1947 to April 1948.
“The defendants in the dock were the cruel executioners, whose terror wrote the blackest page in human history,” Ferencz said in his opening statement at the trial. “Death was their tool and life their toy. If these men be immune, then law has lost its meaning and man must live in fear.”
Undeniable Evidence
Ferencz rested his case after only two court sessions, without calling a single witness. Documents seized from Nazi officials provided indisputable evidence to secure convictions, he said in a 2014 interview with the Atlantic magazine. The rest of the trial consisted of the defendants’ testimony.
Twenty people were found guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes, while two were convicted of only the lesser charge of membership in an illegal organization, according to US National Archives records. Fourteen death sentences were handed down, four of which were carried out. The rest were commuted to prison terms or paroled. All of the incarcerated were released by 1958 in a postwar amnesty drive.
“The charge of purposeful homicide in the case reaches such fantastic proportions and surpasses such credible limits that believability must be bolstered with assurance a hundred times repeated,” the tribunal said in its judgment.
Benjamin Berell Ferencz was born on March 11, 1920, in the Transylvanian town of Somcuta-Mare, part of today’s Romania, to Joseph Ferencz and the former Sarah Legman Schwartz, according to the Wollheim Memorial at the Goethe University in Frankfurt.
Hell’s Kitchen
To escape the persecution of Hungarian Jews in Transylvania, the family emigrated to the US while he was a baby, he wrote in a 1999 article for the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law. Settling in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, he attended the City College of New York before attending Harvard Law School, where he was mentored by Sheldon Glueck, a leading criminologist.
During World War II, he fought in George Patton’s Third Army at the Battle of the Bulge. Ferencz was then transferred to the War Crimes Branch of the US Army, and collected evidence at the concentration camps of Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Dachau.
“Even today, when I close my eyes, I witness a deadly vision I can never forget — the crematoria aglow with the fire of burning flesh, the mounds of emaciated corpses stacked like cordwood waiting to be burned,” he later wrote. “I had peered into Hell.”
Honorably discharged as a sergeant, he returned to New York and prepared to start his legal career before being recruited for the Nuremberg trials.
Later, Ferencz led restitution claims by Holocaust survivors as director general of the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization, which he also represented in reparations negotiations between the Federal Republic of Germany and the state of Israel in 1948.
Compensating Survivors
During the 1950s, he helped obtain compensation payments for concentration-camp survivors from German companies that had employed slave labor, paving the way for future claims of Holocaust victims. He provided his account of the negotiations in his 1979 book, Less Than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation.
After returning to the US in 1957, Ferencz practiced law until the country was beset with protests over its involvement in the Vietnam War. He then dedicated himself full time to the search for world peace.
An adjunct professor of international law at Pace University in New York, Ferencz wrote extensively about global peace and the rule of law. His ideas, outlined in several books, provided a conceptual blueprint for the establishment of the International Criminal Court, which was created by the Rome Statute of 1998 and is based in The Hague.
Ferencz married the former Gertrude Fried in New York in 1946. She died in 2019. They had four children.
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