Honor the last Nuremberg prosecutor

Happy birthday to Ben Ferencz. It’s his 102nd and while he definitely was born in 1920 in Transylvania, from which his Jewish family fled soon thereafter, the exact day isn’t sure, so he long ago settled on March 11.

His exceptional mind was recognized in eighth grade and he was sent to a public school that fed into City College of New York, where boys did eight years of studies in six. Then law school and then a buck private in Patton’s army.

Ferencz was the chief Nuremberg prosecutor of the 24 top Nazi Einsatzgruppen, the 3,000 men who murdered at least a million Soviet Jews. He won 22 convictions and four of them hanged, including the fiend responsible for shooting 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar in Kyiv.

Ferencz then worked on restitution for Holocaust victims in Europe. He later returned to New Rochelle, practicing law, teaching and advocating for creation of the International Criminal Court, which is probing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

At the conclusion of the UN General Assembly debate on condemning Russia last week, Ukrainian Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya, closed by citing Ferencz and his call for “law, not war.” Ferencz is the last living Nuremberg prosecutor and now a resident of Florida. Local Congresswoman Lois Frankel, is sponsoring a bill to award him the Congressional Gold Medal. She has 193 bipartisan cosponsors, but wrongly none of the eight New York Republicans. They should all sign on immediately. The bill also needs Senate sponsors. They should be New Yorkers Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and Florida’s Marco Rubio and Rick Scott. Make this happen.