APRIL 20 • 2023 | 61
B
enjamin Ferencz, the last surviv-
ing member of the prosecuting
team at the Nuremberg trials that
convicted Nazi ringleaders for crimes
against humanity, died April 7, 2023, in
Florida. He was 103.
Ferencz was 27 and a graduate of
Harvard Law School when he was
named as the chief prosecutor at the
Einsatzgruppen Trial, in which 20 mem-
bers of the SS’s mobile death squads were
convicted of war crimes and crimes against
humanity. Two others were convicted of
membership in a criminal organization.
Slight and boyish-looking, he is seen
in newsreel footage of the trials speaking
deliberately and passionately in an accent
shaped by his upbringing in
Manhattan. “Vengeance is
not our goal, nor do we seek
merely a just retribution,
” he
tells the tribunal. “We ask this
court to affirm by internation-
al penal action, man’s right
to live in peace and dignity,
regardless of his race or creed.
The case we present is a plea
of humanity to law.
”
Ferencz would go on
to play a key role on the
team that negotiated the
watershed 1952 reparations
agreements under which West
Germany agreed to pay $822 million to the
State of Israel and to groups representing
Holocaust survivors, as well as to direct
the office seeking to recover assets of Jews
who were murdered. Ferencz was featured
in two recent documentaries about the
Holocaust and its aftermath: Ken Burns’
PBS series, The U.S. and the Holocaust, and
Reckonings: The First Reparations, a 2022
film funded by the German government
with support by the Conference on Jewish
Material Claims Against Germany.
In a statement about the latter film and
his role in the reparations negotiations,
Ferencz said: “
At the time, we were just try-
ing to do what was right. Looking back, I
can see that it was this work, the legal work
of negotiating agreements and finding jus-
tice, that led to peace. It is the indemnifica-
tion that allowed both Israel and Germany
to find a peaceful path forward and rebuild
themselves on the world stage.
”
In December 2022, the U.S. Congress
awarded him the Congressional Gold
Medal, its highest honor, thanks to lobby-
ing by six House members led by Rep. Lois
Frankel, the Florida Democrat.
“Ben Ferencz was a giant,
” said
Menachem Rosensaft, the general counsel
and associate executive vice president of
the World Jewish Congress, in a statement.
“He devoted himself to the very end of his
long and distinguished career to making
sure that the lessons of Nuremberg would
become engrained in both international
law and the consciousness of society as a
whole.
”
Born in Transylvania in 1920,
Ferencz immigrated to the
United States with his Jewish
family as an infant. They settled
in Manhattan, where he attended
City College of New York
before heading to law school
at Harvard. He joined the U.S.
Army after graduation, where he
was eventually assigned to the
headquarters of Gen. George S.
Patton’s Third Army and a team
tasked with collecting evidence
for war crimes. At Buchenwald,
he once 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.
”
Ferencz was a civilian by the time he led
the team at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, one of
the “Subsequent” Nuremberg proceedings
that followed the 1945-1946 International
Military Tribunal. The Subsequent trials,
held between 1946 and 1949, were held by
U.S. military courts and dealt with cases
of crimes against humanity, the use of
slave labor and atrocities against prisoners
of war and partisans. Of all the cases
brought against Nazis, the Einsatzgruppen
Trial, which lasted from September 1947
until April 1948, was the only one to
have Holocaust crimes as its major focus.
After the trials Ferencz became director-
general of the Jewish Restitution Successor
Organization and fought for compensation
for victims and survivors of the Holocaust
and the return of stolen assets. He entered
private law practice, and later worked for
the institution of the International Criminal
Court, which was established in 2002. He
was fiercely critical of the decision by the
United States not to ratify the treaty that
established the court. “War-making itself
is the supreme international crime against
humanity and … it should be deterred
by punishment universally, wherever and
whenever offenders are apprehended,
” he
wrote in 2018.
From 1985 to 1996, he was an adjunct
professor of international law at Pace
University in Manhattan. He eventually
retired to South Florida, but remained
vocal in his opposition to war.
Ferencz is survived by a son and three
daughters. His wife Gertrude died in 2019.
In 2017, the Municipality of The Hague
honored Ferencz for his achievements by
naming the footpath adjacent to the Peace
Palace — which houses the International
Court of Justice — after him. That same
year, following a $1 million renewable gift
from Ferencz, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the
Prevention of Genocide launched the
Ferencz International Justice Initiative.
Nuremberg Prosecutor
Ben Ferencz Dies at 103
ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL JTA
Prosecutor Benjamin
Ferencz at the
Einsatzgruppen Trial
in Nuremberg, which
lasted from September
1947 until April 1948.
WIKIPEDIA
ADAM JONES/WIKIPEDIA
In 2012, Benjamin Ferencz poses in Courtroom
600 of the Palace of Justice, where the
Nuremberg Trials were held 65 years earlier.