Posted on 04/09/2023 12:48:35 PM PDT by Paal Gulli
The last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, who secured guilty verdicts from 22 Nazis and dedicated his life to fighting international injustice, has died at age 103, his son told AFP on Saturday.
Benjamin Ferencz, an American who at age 27 and with no prior trial experience served as one of the trials' chief prosecutors, would go on to later battle for compensation and the return of stolen goods to victims and survivors of the Holocaust.
He died peacefully in his sleep of natural causes Friday evening at an assisted living facility in Boynton Beach, Florida, his son Donald Ferencz told AFP....
(Excerpt) Read more at israelnationalnews.com ...
He was only 100 years old when this interview took place but even at that age his eyes were clear, direct and unflinching and he spoke with the alacrity and focus of a man half his age (he also was wearing the sharpest suit I ever have seen a centenarian in).
Ferencz was in charge of a group of investigators that discovered the existence of a special group of SS called the Einsatzgruppen that followed behind the rapid German advance through Eastern Europe and Russia in the prosecution of Operation Barbarossa. They were charged with rounding up all the undesirables -- communists, intellectuals, ... and Jews -- and "eliminating' them. The discovery came in the form of the reports the Einsatzgruppen itself was sending to its higher HQ (and Hitler) detailing the exact numbers of civilians they were murdering.
Ferencz sat down with these records and an adding machine and began to tot up all the killings they documented. When he got to a million he decided that he knew all he needed to know to present this case to his boss.
He took this information to chief Nuremberg prosecutor Tilford Taylor and told him the Einsatzgruppen's crimes were so vast and so horrific that it was vital that they be prosecuted. Brig. Gen. Taylor said that that wasn't possible because his assets were stretched too thin with the prosecutions already on his plate. Ferencz countered to the effect of 'You don't understand, what I am holding in my hands amounts to a signed confession to more than a million murders.' Taylor finally agreed but on the condition that Ferencz be the lead prosecutor for the extra trials.
Benjamin Ferencz had enlisted in the army right after graduating from Yale law school. He had never tried a case before, and here he was prosecuting possibly the greatest crime in humanity on on the biggest stage in the world.
All 22 of the Nazis he tried were convicted, 13 sentenced to death, and four eventually danced at the end of a rope. Which was only a drop in the bucket but every last one of them probably would have got off unpunished except for Benjamin Ferencz.
The truth was that The Powers That Be had deliberately and severely limited the scope of the trials because they recognized that the chief cause of WWII was the excessively punitive treaty that had ended WWI. The rank-and-file German still felt hard done by over the first World War, and if those same Germans were going to contribute unreservedly to the rebuilding their country, the Allies were going to have to stop lambasting them for their role in the second World War. So for better or worse, they traded the democratization of post-war Germany for the full retribution due to those responsible for the Holocaust.
More's the pity that the last Nuremberg prosecutor has died while there still are unprosecuted Nazi war criminals walking the earth, alive and free.
Ferencz at Nuremberg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b67B-MoKG_o
The film:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5078614/
They will be punished. No one eludes the Great White Throne Judgment.
It sounds as if trade-offs were made , and decisions were made about what the priorities needed to be.
Great video, a 2005 interview with Ferencz, telling his story in his own words. How an army private artillery soldier becomes a war crimes prosecutor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-8m5YHt__4
BOOKMARK
In a 2005 interview for The Washington Post, [Ferencz] revealed some of his activities during his period in Germany by way of showing how different military legal norms were at the time:
"Someone who was not there could never really grasp how unreal the situation was ... I once saw DPs [displaced persons] beat an SS man and then strap him to the steel gurney of a crematorium. They slid him in the oven, turned on the heat and took him back out. Beat him again, and put him back in until he was burnt alive. I did nothing to stop it. I suppose I could have brandished my weapon or shot in the air, but I was not inclined to do so. Does that make me an accomplice to murder? You know how I got witness statements? I'd go into a village where, say, an American pilot had parachuted and been beaten to death and line everyone one up against the wall. Then I'd say, "Anyone who lies will be shot on the spot." It never occurred to me that statements taken under duress would be invalid."
My Opinion: History is always more complex than some people think. The Good Guys are not 100% good. The Bad Guys are not 100% bad. Life is full of hard choices. Just as one aspect of this: The current Woke effort to eliminate the Confederate history from US history and from towns across America really fails to understand how complex history is for anyone who is caught up in it.
After the war ended, many top Nazis were sentenced to long prison sentences. Some even got life sentences. Many were then released early for “health” reasons. These “ailing” Nazis then went on to live for many years.
Disgusting.
I just watched "Judgement at Nuremburg" for the first time and the moral issues (peaceful post-war Germany vs full retributions for WW II Crimes against humanity) you described were covered very well in the movie.
I also recently watched the documentary "The Adolf Eichmann Trial - Justice in Jerusalem." on YouTube.
Before that I watched "Operation Finale" on Netflix about the Mossad's operation to capture Eichman in Argentina and transport him to Israel for trial.
Yes, a number of really bad people had a stint in prison (if even that) and then went on to live quite comfortably.
My father was in North Africa & Europe for 4 years during World War 2.
He saw things that you would never want to see...
> My Opinion: History is always more complex than some people think. The Good Guys are not 100% good. The Bad Guys are not 100% bad. <
A friend of my father’s served in the US Army in Italy during WW II. It was early in 1945. The Germans were retreating, and his division was rapidly advancing. And they took no prisoners. Every surrendering German was shot.
This guy said it had to be done. Escorting so many prisoners to the rear would severely weaken his unit. Then they couldn’t support Allied units on either side of them. Allied soldiers would die because of that.
Was shooting those German soldiers a cruel necessity? A war crime? Both?
This example is showing how things are more complex than people think.
I have a friend from Poland whose family is from the eastern half of the country. Due to the Hitler/Stalin Peace Pact of 1939, the country was divided into two with the Bolsheviks taking control of the eastern half. The Communists butchered most of her family; she said as horrific as the German occupation of western Poland was, it was also extremely bad in eastern Poland under the Bolshevik Soviets. Due to the necessity of war (Stalin’s Russia became an ally in December 1941), the Bolshevik atrocities were never publicized, none of those who led the effort were ever prosecuted and “Uncle Joe” was our friend.
“So for better or worse, they traded the democratization of post-war Germany for the full retribution due to those responsible for the Holocaust.“
Go after every cog in the infernal machine. Who’s going to resent that. I’d guess the rest wouldn’t mind at all projecting any of their own sense of guilt on the operators.
My dad finished out his hitch in the Army guarding prisoners at the Nuremberg trials.
I saw Judgement at Nuremberg in 1981, and I still recall the final scene between Burt Lancaster and Spencer Tracy. Lancaster, the convicted Nazi judge said he didn’t think the Holocaust would ever happen. Tracy replied “It came to that the very first time you sentenced to death a man you knew to be innocent.”
“Go after every cog in the infernal machine. “
The just thing to do. But not the right one.
Hundreds of thousands of Germans played some role in the Holocaust and the other Germans atrocities.
To give each of them a fair trial would have been a decades long saga.
The only option was to try a few thousand of the worst and most prominent.
Albert Speer should have been executed. He was imprisoned at Spandau 1947-1966. Speer died in 1981.
Either Speer was the greatest conman ever, or more likely, I think they wanted to let one member of Hitler's inner circle to live to tell the tale, and Speer was the "lucky" one.
We also had to consider making sure Germany didn’t fall to the Communists.
People forget how close the Communists came to taking over France and Italy after the war.
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