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AT 100 years old, Benjamin Ferencz is the last surviving prosecutor of the biggest murder case in history: the Nuremberg trials, held in the wake of the Second World War to mete out justice to those responsible for the evils of the Holocaust.
Astonishingly, it was his very first case. At just 27, he was tasked with gathering evidence but when 22 members of the Einsatzgruppen – death squads who killed over a million Jews and other minorities – were charged, he offered to lead the prosecution for an overwhelmed legal team.
Benjamin’s family were Jewish immigrants who had left Transylvania for New York. His legal studies at Harvard were interrupted by war service. He survived every major battle in Europe, including Normandy.
In 1944, he was tasked with setting up a Nazi war crimes branch and witnessed horrific scenes at concentration camps. While locating evidence, he dug up bodies from shallow graves, some with his bare hands.
Here, in extracts from his new book Parting Words – 9 Lessons for a Remarkable Life, he describes what he saw there and the subsequent trial which would shape his life.
Extracted by EMILY RETTER
I went to about 10 camps, including Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg and Ebensee. The scenes of death and inhumanity were identical. I remember it very, very vividly. It is difficult to describe even now.
You carry that with you for the rest of your life. The total chaos. The battle still raging. Bodies lying all over the ground, some dead, some wounded, begging, weak, pleading with their eyes for something.
I’ve seen piles of skin and bones stacked up like cordwood, helpless skeletons with diarrhoea, dysentery, typhus, TB and pneumonia. I’ve seen people crawling through garbage like rats, digging with their hands for a piece of bread or a morsel to eat. I’ve seen the crematorium going with bodies shovelled in, their ashes spread on the field like fertilizer.
It was as if I had peered into hell. So I devised a system. I pretended it didn’t exist.
Normally I’m a pretty rational guy, but I would say to myself, ‘It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real.’ I would pretend it was part of a show of some kind.
What else could I do? I couldn’t sit down and start screaming and tearing my hair out, or grab some German and beat him over the head with a hammer.
I told myself to do my job. You could always count on the Germans for their records; they were meticulous note-takers. I could see what had gone on in the camp.
The list of inmates, their numbers when they were first sent to Auschwitz to be registered, which transport they were with and when the first transport arrived from Hungary, Romania, or Germany. Of course, most of them were already dead.
With that information I would go back to my typewriter and write up a report of what I had seen and who were the people responsible: who was in charge of the camp, how many people were killed, who the guards there had been. On that basis, we’d send out arrest orders to have them picked up.
Do your job: seize the evidence and move on to the next camp. Move on.
It was that attitude which kept me from going stark raving mad.
I distinctly remember meeting an inmate who worked at Buchenwald, who I believe was a French national. ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’ He took a shovel and went to the perimeter of the camp, which was a barbed-wire fence, and we dug up a box.
From it he took out a number of little booklets, which looked like passports.
The SS carried the books and every time they showed up for an evening meeting of the camp’s social club, where they would drink and frolic, they had to present their booklet and get a stamp in there.
When the booklet was filled with 50 stamps, this inmate who worked in the office was told to dispose of the old one. But instead of destroying them, he hid them. He knew, in an act of faith, that there would be a day of reckoning. This
man’s gift was a goldmine for me. These guys, the perpetrators and accomplices, were all going to tell me they hadn’t been there, but I had the dates they y showed up p for the club, I had their number, mber, I knew who they were.
Often in n the camps the remaining SS would d be fleeing the scene.
Most of the inmates were too sick or weak to move, but there were still l a number of them who were re up and about. In one camp p I saw them catch one of the e guards and begin to beat him. . When he was semius, semiconscious, they put him on a gurney, dragged him to the crematorium, put him in and began to cook him. They left him in there for a while, but not enough to kill him. They dragged him out, beat him up again and p put him back in again. g They did that three or o four times until he wa was suf ficiently we wel l baked and sure surely dead. I wa was initially taske tasked with finding the th evidence to pu put on 12 trial trials, which dea dealt specifically with wit branches o of G e rm a n governmen government and society. First were th the doctors wh who performe performed medical experiment camp victims; then we perverted the law by political purposes.
We had the indust the funds to build the have slave labour; the the way for Hitler’s w military, and the Storm who did the actual kil
Then something ha been the spring of 19 diligent researchers, F excitedly into my offic
He handed me – marked top had been sent in Berlin to pe of the Nazi regime.
Many generals wer list, along with high-r Third Reich. The d ‘Reports of Events in t from a unit called Ei turned out to be an SS
The trial had to stand for something more than justice to have any significance
BENJAMIN FERENCZ CHIEF PROSECUTOR