Last Friday, Benjamin Ferencz—the last living member of the prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials—died at the age one-hundred-and-three. When he joined his fellow American attorneys in 1947, he had no prior courtroom experience. Emily Langer writes:
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. All 22 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 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.
By the time Mr. Ferencz’s phase of the [Nuremberg] 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. . . . 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.
Read more on Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2023/04/08/ben-ferencz-dead-nuremberg-law/