Rest in peace Mr. Ben Ferencz: Hero of justice for millions of murdered Jews

Ben Ferencz (1920-2003) - After World War II, he brought 22 Nazi officers to trial for murder. The men were Einsatzgruppen commanders who were responsible for killing more than a million people — not in concentration camps, but in towns and villages across Eastern Europe. 

They would never have been brought to justice were it not for Ferencz.

Ben Ferencz, was the last living Nuremberg prosecutor. He died at 103, in Boynton Beach, Florida.

At 27, he prosecuted Nazis for more than 1 million deaths in perhaps the largest murder case in history.

Echo report by Emily Langer for The Washington Post.

Ben Ferencz was a 27-year-old lawyer with no courtroom experience when he prosecuted what would be called the largest murder case in history. Standing 5-foot-2, he nearly disappeared behind the lectern in the packed courtroom in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1947.

Mr. Ferencz, a Transylvanian-born Jew who had arrived in the United States as an infant, presented to a U.S. tribunal the massive case against 22 authorities of the mobile Nazi killing units, called Einsatzgruppen, that operated in Eastern Europe during World War II.

A memorial plaque in Budapest, Hungary

 (L'Heureux photograph)

Most of the murders along the edge of the River Danube took place around December 1944 and January 1945, when the members of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party police ("Nyilas") took as many as 20,000 Jews from the newly established Budapest ghetto and executed them along the river bank.

All 22 of the defendants were convicted. Four were executed. If not for Mr. Ferencz, a former Army investigator who personally tallied the million deaths using sequestered German war documents and brought the case to his superiors, the men might never have been tried.

Mr. Ferencz, who devoted much of the rest of his life to the cause of international justice, and who was the last living Nuremberg prosecutor, died April 7 at an assisted-living facility in Boynton Beach, Fla. He was 103. 

His son, Don, confirmed the death but gave no cause.

Mr. Ferencz spoke only Yiddish until he went to school, and he was the first person in his family to go to college. He graduated from Harvard Law School, where he studied war crimes before joining the Army midway through World War II. He was detailed to an investigations unit collecting evidence of Nazi crimes.

Following Allied liberators, Mr. Ferencz visited Nazi concentration camps, including 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 once said. “I had peered into hell.”

He was “the lawyer for humanity,” said John Q. Barrett, a professor of law at St. John’s University in New York City and a scholar of the Nuremberg trials. “The scale of the atrocities, the pure innocence of the victims … was at the heart of the exterminationist evil of Nazism.”

Mr. Ferencz said that when he left Europe at the end of his military service, he wished never to return to Germany. But he was soon recruited back to serve as a civilian under Brig. Gen. Telford Taylor, who succeeded U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson as chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg.

By the time Mr. Ferencz’s phase of the proceedings began, the highest Nazi officials, including Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess, had been prosecuted. Britain, France and the Soviet Union had moved on to other postwar concerns, leaving the United States to oversee any further prosecutions in Nuremberg.

Under Taylor’s prosecutorial leadership, the tribunal decided the cases of Nazi doctors who had conducted medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, as well as industrialists who had availed themselves of slave labor.

Mr. Ferencz was overseeing investigators examining documents in the German Foreign Ministry when one of his researchers discovered top-secret reports from Einsatzgruppen, detailing the towns and cities the killing squads passed through and the horrors they visited upon them. Barrett described the documents as “murder receipts.”

One, labeled Exhibit 179, was a dispatch from Kyiv.

“The city’s Jews were ordered to present themselves,” read the document, according to an account on the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes.” “About thirty-four thousand reported, including women and children. After they had been made to give up their clothing and valuables, all of them were killed, which took several days.”

Speaking to the London Guardian, Mr. Ferencz recalled that one defendant had ordered his troops: “If the mother is holding an infant to her breast, don’t shoot the mother, shoot the infant because the bullet will go through both of them, and you’ll save ammunition.”

With the United States seeking to form a Cold War alliance with what was to become West Germany, Taylor was under pressure to conclude the tribunal’s proceedings, Barrett said. 

Benjamin Ferencz, chief prosecutor in the "Einsatzgruppen Trial", 1947 - 48. Bust by Bjørn Okholm Skaarup. Donation to the Nuremberg Museum, by the artist, in honor of the 101st birthday of Benjamin Ferencz on March 11, 2021.

Initially, the overextended staff seemed unprepared to take on another case, especially one as large as the Einsatzgruppen matter. But Mr. Ferencz implored his superiors not to overlook such a consequential crime.

“I start screaming,” Mr. Ferencz told “60 Minutes” in 2017, recalling his conversation with Taylor. “I said, Look, I’ve got here mass murder, mass murder on an unparalleled scale. And he said, can you do this in addition to your other work? And I said, sure. He said, okay. So you do it.”

With that, Mr. Ferencz found himself in charge of the case.

He chose the defendants based on their rank and education. He could have charged thousands, he said, but was limited by the number of seats in the courtroom.