- Person
- Benjamin Ferencz
- Lived
- 1920–2023
- Field
- International law
- From
- American
The story
By 1945 Benjamin Ferencz had fought across Europe as an enlisted soldier with an anti-aircraft artillery battalion, from Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge. A graduate of Harvard Law School, where he had done research for a professor writing about war crimes, he was transferred that year to the headquarters of General George S. Patton's Third Army and assigned to a team setting up a war crimes branch and collecting evidence.
As the Allied armies closed in on Germany, the work took him into concentration camps the US Army had just liberated, among them Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg and Ebensee, often within days and sometimes within hours of liberation. Ferencz later described the scenes as grim beyond words: the ground covered with the dead, skeletal bodies piled in front of the crematoria because they could not be burned fast enough, and survivors in rags who could barely move.
He forced himself not to let it overwhelm him, because his task was urgent: to secure Nazi records before they could be destroyed. On arrival he would head straight for the camp office, seal it off and order that nobody, German or American, could enter without his permission. In that way he took complete control of the archives.
He and his team gathered thousands of documents at the camps and at facilities in Berlin. After Ferencz joined the Nuremberg prosecution in 1946, the most important discovery of all came from a Foreign Office building in Berlin: detailed reports on the Einsatzgruppen, the SS mobile killing units that had murdered more than a million people. That evidence became the backbone of the Einsatzgruppen trial, in which Ferencz, at 27, was chief prosecutor and secured the conviction of every defendant without calling a single witness.
Ferencz's speed and determination preserved proof that might otherwise have vanished. The documents gathered by war crimes investigators like him became part of the permanent record of the Holocaust, proof drawn from the perpetrators' own files.
Why it matters
Ferencz's speed in seizing records preserved proof of Nazi crimes that might otherwise have vanished, making later trials and the historical record possible.
About Benjamin Ferencz
At 27, in his first case, chief prosecutor of the Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg; he spent the rest of his 103 years campaigning for an International Criminal Court.
More about Benjamin Ferencz
- Ben Ferencz spoke at the ICC's first trialIn 2011, aged 91, Ben Ferencz delivered a closing statement in the International Criminal Court's trial of Thomas Lubanga, and hailed his 2012 conviction as a milestone.
- Ben Ferencz gave up his law practice to work for peaceAfter 13 years in private practice, and moved by the Vietnam War, Ben Ferencz quit to campaign full time for an international criminal court and laws against aggression.
- Ben Ferencz called his case a plea of humanity to lawOpening his Nuremberg case in 1947, Ben Ferencz said vengeance was not the goal: the case was a plea of humanity to law, a theme that guided the rest of his life.
- Ben Ferencz taught international law at Pace UniversityFrom 1985 to 1996 Ben Ferencz was an adjunct professor of international law at Pace University in White Plains, New York, passing on the lessons of Nuremberg.
- Ben Ferencz, 27, won the "biggest murder trial in history"At 27, in his first case, Ben Ferencz was chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen trial, then spent decades campaigning for an International Criminal Court.
- Ben Ferencz gave his savings to prevent genocideBen Ferencz donated $1 million to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's genocide prevention work and pledged to leave his life savings to genocide prevention initiatives.
- Ben Ferencz stayed in Germany to win restitution for victimsAfter Nuremberg, Ben Ferencz spent a decade in Germany setting up programs to return looted property and compensate victims of Nazi persecution, and helped shape the 1953 restitution law.
Sources
- Ben Ferencz, former Nuremberg trials prosecutor, dies at 103 NBC News
- Benjamin B. Ferencz Wikipedia
- Ben Ferencz (1920–2023): In His Own Words USC Shoah Foundation
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.