As a lawyer, Benjamin Ferencz secured evidence in the concentration camps and prepared the Nuremberg trials. In 1947, at the age of 27, he became the US Chief Prosecutor. Now he died at the age of 103.
Ben Ferencz was 27 years old when he became Chief Prosecutor in Nuremberg
This man made history in two senses – as a US soldier, the young Ben Ferencz tracked down important evidence for the Nuremberg trials. Without his accidental legal discovery, it would have been difficult for the US prosecution to bring the Nazi leadership to justice in 1945.
As a lawyer, Ferencz later campaigned with great passion for the establishment of an International Criminal Court – which he finally succeeded in doing. The establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague in 2002 goes back to his persistent initiative, before which war crimes can still be prosecuted and even heads of state can be held legally accountable.
War deployment in Europe
His time as a soldier in the US Army got off to a dreary start: the well-read Harvard graduate, who owed his law degree to a scholarship for the gifted, started out as a typist at Camp Davis, North Carolina. At the time he could neither typewrite nor fire a gun. Cleaning the toilet and scrubbing pots and floors were part of the job.
In the spring of 1944, things got serious for the young Benjamin Ferencz: his combat unit was transferred to England during the Second World War. On June 6, 1944, the famous D-Day, US soldier Ferencz and his comrades jumped from the landing craft onto Omaha Beach on the northern French coast. The Allied invasion of Normandy had begun – the beginning of the end of Nazi domination of Europe.
Benjamin Ferencz was 103 years old
When the US troops were advancing, Ferencz and his unit broke through the Nazi West Wall, fought at the front line in the Ardennes offensive and crossed the Remagen bridge over the Rhine with the victorious Americans at the end of the advance in spring 1945.
After the end of the war, the headquarters of General Patton's 3rd US Army were looking for legally experienced people to secure evidence of Nazi war crimes. The young lawyer Ferencz finally got the job that did justice to his abilities.
Ben Ferencz and his team systematically combed through Nazi authorities, SS clerks and visited the concentration camps liberated by the US Army. What he found in Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen and other camps was beyond his imagination of the Nazis' horrible crimes and murderous machinery.
First arrest warrants against Nazi leaders
“It was important to secure the evidence, the lists of inmates, the names of the camp management and those responsible at the SS,” Ferencz said in his memoirs (“Sag immer Deinetrude”, 2020). “On this basis, we issued arrest warrants to arrest the people. We secured all the evidence and drove straight to the nearest camp.”
On the way, they met Red Army units who made short work of SS officers who had been apprehended. At that moment, the lawyer in uniform realized that he – the son of Hungarian Jews who had emigrated – was not concerned with revenge and retribution, but with justice.
Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler's former deputy Rudolf Hess and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (centre from left to right) as the main accused in the Nuremberg court in 1946
He witnessed the first Nuremberg trials against the main war criminals of the Nazi regime, which began on November 20, 1945, only as a spectator. His return to civilian life in the USA was already planned. “When the trial began, the rows were packed tightly. The audience sat on top of the gallery. But as the trial progressed, the rows emptied. The Germans showed little more interest.”
“We searched all the Nazi archives “
Back in America, the former US soldier was unemployed and no law firm wanted to entrust him with a case. A telegram from the Pentagon surprisingly ordered him to see General Telford Taylor, an excellent lawyer and personally appointed by US President Truman to be responsible for the Nuremberg follow-up trials. Taylor called the war-experienced Ferencz into his task force for “Germany”.
“The US felt that the Nuremberg trials of the top 22 Nazis did not fully explain how something like this could have happened in a civilized country like Germany,” recalls Ferencz in the documentary “A Man Can Make a Difference” ( 2015). “The first task I was given by Taylor was to go to Berlin and collect evidence of the monstrous Nazi crimes there.”
The war-torn capital became the headquarters of the US central investigative agency. Greater Berlin had meanwhile been divided into separate sectors by the four occupying powers – USA, Great Britain, USSR and France. Each had their own law enforcement methods.
Ben Ferencz and his 50-strong team of investigators were given a free hand and secured vast amounts of documents and incriminating material from the extensive Nazi bureaucracy. The Berlin Gestapo headquarters in particular proved to be a haven of German thoroughness. “A legal gold mine,” Ferencz called it.
Chief Prosecutor in the “Einsatzgruppen Trial”
In the spring of 1947, an employee came across three thick folders in the filing cabinets of the Foreign Office, labeled “Event reports from the USSR – Reports from the Eastern Front”. “They were reports from SS special forces, disguised by a seemingly meaningless name: Einsatztruppen. Nobody knew what that was,” Ben Ferencz later recalled. He immediately recognized the political explosiveness of the find: “It looked harmless, but inside it was marked with thick stamps as 'Secret Reich matter'.”
These pieces of evidence were the legal foundation for one of the largest murder trials in history: On September 15, 1947, Ben Ferencz delivered his opening arguments. At 27, he was the youngest chief prosecutor in the “Einsatzgruppen Trial,” the first of twelve Nuremberg follow-up trials that the United States alone continued.
Ferencz is considered to be one of the idea generators for the International Criminal Court in The Hague
Idea for an International Criminal Court
For Ferencz, who was born to Jewish parents in the Carpathians in 1920 and grew up in great poverty in New York, these experiences in post-war Germany were formative. As a representative of the Jewish Claims Conference, he later campaigned tirelessly for the reparations agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany, which was signed in Luxembourg in 1952. And he legally represented the claims of forced labourers, especially from Eastern Europe, who had been enslaved and exploited by the Nazis.
In 2010, Benjamin Ferencz received the Grand Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his lifelong commitment to international law at the Foreign Office in Berlin presented to Germany. But he received what is probably his most important honor in Nuremberg, the site of his first legal successes: As a video message, his personal speech opened the celebrations for the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials on November 20, 2020. Only after him did German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier speak. Now the man who wrote legal history has died at the age of 103.