The Jewish attorney who prosecuted Nazis
Benjamin Ferencz was just 27 years old, with zero trial experience, when he prosecuted the biggest murder case in history. A 5-foot-2 Jewish immigrant, Ferencz was investigating Nazi war crimes for the U.S. Army when one of his researchers learned of the units called Einsatzgruppen, which had executed some 2 million Jews across Eastern Europe during World War II. He gathered evidence meticulously and became the youngest prosecutor at the U.S. military tribunals in Nuremberg, where Hitler’s henchmen were held responsible for their atrocities. At one trial he prosecuted 24 Einsatzgruppen authorities; 22 were found guilty and 14 sentenced to death. The evidence was overwhelming: The units had shot 25,000 Jews in two days in Latvia and had slaughtered more than 33,000 in Ukraine, at Babi Yar. Yet “vengeance is not our goal,” Ferencz said. “We ask this court to affirm by international penal action man’s right to live in peace and dignity.”
Ferencz was born to illiterate parents in Somcuta Mare, Transylvania, now part of Romania, said The New York Times. When he was 10 months old, the family fled to the United States to escape a pogrom, and he grew up in New York, attending City College before graduating from Harvard Law School in 1943. Fluent in six languages, during the war he participated in the invasion of Normandy and fought in Germany. Later, the Army assigned him to search liberated concentration camps for evidence of war crimes, said The Washington Post. After witnessing “emaciated corpses stacked like cordwood waiting to be burned,” Ferencz later said, “I had peered into hell.”
At Nuremberg, Ferencz prosecuted the Einsatzgruppen without calling a single witness, said The Guardian, as the Nazi paperwork was damning enough on its own. He also secured convictions of German industrialists who exploited Jewish slave labor to power the war effort. After several decades in private practice, he devoted himself to campaigning for global justice and the establishment of the International Criminal Court, and at that court’s first trial—against a Congolese warlord in 2011—Ferencz, then
92, gave closing arguments. To the end he was troubled that the U.S. and other major nations failed to recognize the ICC. Without international law, he said, “the same cruel mentality that made the Holocaust possible might one day destroy the entire human race.”