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Ben Ferencz Prosecuted the Einsatzgruppen in the Largest Murder Case in History

(Washington Post) Emily Langer - Ben Ferencz, the last living Nuremberg prosecutor, died April 7 at 103. In 1947 he prosecuted what would be called the largest murder case in history against 22 authorities of the mobile Nazi killing units, called Einsatzgruppen, that operated in Eastern Europe during World War II. All the defendants were convicted. Four were executed. If not for 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. Ferencz 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, and visited Nazi concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Dachau. "Even today, when I close my eyes, I witness a deadly vision I can never forget - the crematoria aglow with the fire of burning flesh, the mounds of emaciated corpses stacked like cordwood waiting to be burned," he once said. "I had peered into hell." Ferencz recalled that one defendant had ordered his troops: "If the mother is holding an infant to her breast, don't shoot the mother, shoot the infant because the bullet will go through both of them, and you'll save ammunition." Ferencz called no witnesses; the copious Nazi documentation was sufficient to obtain convictions. He argued that the defendants had acted not according to "military necessity, but by that supreme perversion of thought: the Nazi theory of the master race."
2023-04-20 00:00:00
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