Ben Ferencz, Prosecutor Of Nazi War Criminals, Passes at 103

Born in Transylvania in 1920, his parents immigrated to New York City when he was 10 months old andhe grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, where his father worked as a janitor and house painter. He earned a scholarship to Harvard Law School and after graduation in 1943 joined an anti-aircraft artillery battalion with the U.S. Army, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge.

As a member of an Army unit investigating war crimes in 1945 – the War Crimes Section of the Judge Advocate’s Office – he searched for evidence of murders at Mauthausen and other Nazi concentration camps. He eye-witnessed evidence of the engineering of the Holocaust in concentration camps liberated by the Allies and sealed off main offices to preserve the archives.

At Buchenwald, he recalled, “I saw crematoria still going. The bodies starved, lying dying, on the ground. I’ve seen the horrors of war more than can be adequately described.” Then, in Berlin, the team discovered SS files that listed all of the Jews, Roma, Communists and prisoners of war killed in the Soviet Union.

On his website, Ferencz explained, “On a small calculator, I added up the number of those who were murdered. When I reached one million, I stopped counting.”

Following the International Military Tribunal sentencing of major war criminals such as Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess, he was named chief prosecutor at the Einsatzgruppen Trial and indicted 24 leading SS death squad commanders on 3 counts: crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in organizations previously declared criminal by the Tribunal. 

“It is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenseless men, women, and children,” he said in his opening statement in 1947.