By\u00a0Emily Langer. April 8, 2023<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At 27, he prosecuted Nazis for more than 1 million deaths in perhaps the largest murder case in history<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ben Ferencz was a 27-year-old lawyer<\/a> with no courtroom experience when he prosecuted what would be called the largest murder case in history. Standing 5-foot-2, he nearly\u00a0disappeared behind<\/a>\u00a0the lectern in the packed courtroom in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1947.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He was \u201cthe lawyer for humanity,\u201d said John Q. Barrett, a professor of law at St. John\u2019s University in New York City and a scholar of the Nuremberg trials. \u201cThe scale of the atrocities, the pure innocence of the victims \u2026 was at the heart of the exterminationist evil of Nazism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Following Allied liberators, Mr. Ferencz visited Nazi concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Dachau.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEven today, when I close my eyes, I witness a deadly vision I can never forget \u2014 the crematoria aglow with the fire of burning flesh, the mounds of emaciated corpses stacked like cordwood waiting to be burned,\u201d he once said. \u201cI had peered into hell.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a>, who succeeded U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson as chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The improbable story of the man who won history\u2019s \u2018biggest murder trial\u2019 at Nuremberg<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time Mr. Ferencz\u2019s phase of the proceedings began, the highest Nazi officials, including Hermann G\u00f6ring 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Under Taylor\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cmurder receipts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One, labeled Exhibit 179, was a dispatch from Kyiv.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe city\u2019s Jews were ordered to present themselves,\u201d read the document, according to an account on the CBS newsmagazine \u201c60 Minutes.\u201d \u201cAbout 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Speaking<\/a>\u00a0to the London Guardian, Mr. Ferencz recalled that one defendant had ordered his troops: \u201cIf the mother is holding an infant to her breast, don\u2019t shoot the mother, shoot the infant because the bullet will go through both of them, and you\u2019ll save ammunition.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s proceedings, Barrett said. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI start screaming,\u201d Mr. Ferencz told \u201c60 Minutes\u201d in 2017, recalling his conversation with Taylor. \u201cI said, Look, I\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n With that, Mr. Ferencz found himself in charge of the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mr. Ferencz called no witnesses; the copious Nazi documentation was sufficient to obtain convictions. The defense sought unsuccessfully to challenge the authenticity of the reports, claiming that the killing units had boastfully inflated the number of dead, and arguing that the defendants were simply following orders \u2014 a position roundly rejected at Nuremberg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mr. Ferencz\u2019s statements before the court were notable, Barrett said, because he used the still-new term \u201cgenocide.\u201d Calmly, yet forcefully, he argued<\/a> that the defendants had acted not according to \u201cmilitary necessity, but by that supreme perversion of thought: the Nazi theory of the master race.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cVengeance is not our goal, nor do we seek merely a just retribution,\u201d Mr. Ferencz said in his\u00a0opening statement<\/a>. \u201cWe ask this court to affirm by international penal action, man\u2019s right to live in peace and dignity, regardless of his race or creed. The case we present is a plea of humanity to law.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In its judgment, the court declared<\/a> that \u201cthe charge of purposeful homicide in this case reaches such fantastic proportions and surpasses such credible limits that believability must be bolstered with assurance a hundred times repeated.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mr. Ferencz carried out his \u201cplea of humanity to law\u201d for decades as an advocate for the rule of law. By the 1970s, as he became increasingly disheartened by the Vietnam War, he scaled back his private New York legal practice to devote himself to the cause of establishing an infrastructure for international justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Barrett described him as a \u201cone-man conscience operation,\u201d writing books and \u201cbuttonholing \u2026 cajoling \u2026 pushing\u201d for the establishment of the permanent legal institution that, in 1998, became the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Mr. Ferencz contended that the very act of war \u2014 the impetus for the crimes against humanity that he sought to avoid \u2014 was the most grievous crime of all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the ICC\u2019s first trial, against Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo in 2011, Mr. Ferencz was invited at age 91 to deliver closing arguments. The next year, Lubanga was convicted of the war crime of using child soldiers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wherever international justice was practiced, Mr. Ferencz seemed in some way present. Antonio Cassese<\/a>, first president of The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, recalled in remarks to the United Nations Mr. Ferencz\u2019s words at the Nuremberg trial:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDeath was their tool and life their toy,\u201d he said<\/a>. \u201cIf these men be immune, then law has lost its meaning, and man must live in fear.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bela Ferencz was born in the Transylvanian town of Somcuta Mare, in what was then Hungary, on March 11, 1920. In the United States he was given the name Benjamin Berell Ferencz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He grew up in Manhattan\u2019s Hell\u2019s Kitchen neighborhood, where his father worked as a janitor and house painter. He graduated in 1940 from the City College of New York and in 1943 from Harvard Law School.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the war, he participated in the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge. After the Nuremberg trials, he worked in Europe on programs to restore stolen property and offer compensation to victims of Nazi persecution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mr. Ferencz later went into private practice with Taylor, becoming a partner at his New York firm. In 2016, Mr. Ferencz made financial pledges to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for the establishment of the Ben Ferencz International Justice Initiative<\/a> to assist those \u201cseeking redress \u2014 rather than revenge\u201d \u2014 for genocide and other crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n