Former prosecutor draws lessons from Nuremberg

“The camps were usually covered with dead bodies,” said Benjamin Ferencz. “Sometimes you couldn’t tell if they were dead or alive. The crematorium was still going, bodies piled up like cordwood waiting to be burned. The SS usually had fled. I would go into the office, get the records – they kept a very careful registry of all the people who were killed. Pages and pages and pages. I would take that back to headquarters and write up a report.”

Ferencz, renowned human rights advocate and former prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, was among the troops who liberated Buchenwald and other Nazi concentration camps. It was his job to collect evidence of the atrocities.

He expounded on his experiences as a war crimes investigator during a talk Nov 7 in Konover Auditorium at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. The audience, mostly students, packed the room to hear the 85-year-old lawyer. Ferencz’s presentation was the 11th Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lecture.

A Harvard Law School graduate, Ferencz joined the army in 1943 and fought under Gen. George Patton. After being honorably discharged as an Army sergeant, he was recruited by the Pentagon for the Nuremberg trials. He was given the rank of general and, at 27, had the task of prosecuting 22 Nazi defendants. The defendants were members of mobile killing squads, and were charged with the murder of more than a million people. All were convicted, including six Nazi generals. Thirteen were sentenced to death.

“I was given a staff of 50 people to go through the German archives in Berlin,” he said. “A lot was destroyed, but there were still records in different places.

“One day, one of my research analysts handed me a big looseleaf binder,” he said. “The papers were top secret, in German, about the special extermination squads. Their job was to go behind the German lines and murder in cold blood every single Jewish man, woman, and child they could lay their hands on, every gypsy, and anybody else who posed a potential threat to the Third Reich.”

The reports gave the name of the commanding officer, the unit, the location, and how many people were killed, Ferencz said: “They never said ‘murdered’. They said ‘got rid of,’ ‘eliminated,’ ‘transported,’ or ‘removed.’ They always used some euphemism. But to the victims, it meant they were dead.

“I took a little adding machine and I began to add them up, and when I reached over a million people killed, I stopped adding,” he said.

There were already 12 trials in progress, but Ferencz told authorities, “you can’t let these guys go. Gen. Taylor asked if I would be willing to handle the case in addition to my other work. I said sure, and lo and behold, I became the chief prosecutor of the United States at the age of 27.”

Ferencz said he picked the defendants by their rank and education. Almost all had doctorates.