‘No one showed any sign of remorse’: Ben Ferencz on prosecuting Nazi death squads

On 29 September 1947, what the Associated Press called “the biggest murder trial in history” opened at Nuremberg. Decades later, its chief prosecutor, Ben Ferencz, told the BBC how he built the case that convicted 22 members of Nazi death squads.

Ferencz, a Hungarian-Jewish New Yorker, enlisted in the US Army straight after graduating Harvard Law School in 1943 and landed at Normandy. As a war crimes investigator, he was among the first American troops to enter liberated Nazi concentration camps — an experience he rarely discussed. “I don’t like to talk about it much because I have difficulty controlling my own emotions,” he told Zeinab Badawi in a 2017 interview, recalling bodies on the ground at Buchenwald and prisoners reduced to “skeletons dressed in rags.”

After returning to New York in 1945, Ferencz was asked by the Pentagon to assist with the Nuremberg trials, which officials felt had so far only captured “a camera shot of a small sampling” of Nazi crimes through the prosecution of Hermann Göring. Sent to Berlin with roughly 50 researchers to comb Nazi archives, his team stumbled on records that would change the scope of the trials entirely: daily reports from the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units that had executed Jewish civilians and other perceived enemies of the Reich across occupied territory, with an estimated 3,000 members involved in mass shootings in places such as Poland and the Soviet Union.

A trial that almost didn’t happen

Ferencz pushed for a dedicated trial, but was initially rebuffed by chief US prosecutor General Telford Taylor, who told him the legal teams were already stretched and Pentagon approval was unlikely. Undeterred, Ferencz offered to take it on himself — “It was an accident that I was a chief prosecutor,” he later said.

With only 22 seats available in the dock, he had to narrow thousands of suspects down to a token sample, prioritising those in custody and of senior rank. “Of the 3,000, all of whom were complicit in mass murder… I picked out 22,” he said, acknowledging the exercise was necessarily incomplete: “I never anticipated or tried to do justice in the broad sense of holding every criminal accountable. It would have been a practical impossibility.”

He built his case on the defendants’ own paperwork — incriminating reports sent to commanders detailing kill counts — and dismissed the “following orders” defence as “baloney,” arguing the men had carried out killings “with such enthusiasm, they wanted to brag about how many they killed.” All 22 pleaded not guilty. “No one ever showed any sign of remorse whatsoever,” Ferencz recalled. “These men wrote the darkest page in human history.”

The tribunal ultimately convicted 20 defendants of war crimes connected to the murder of more than a million people, with two more found guilty only of belonging to a criminal organisation. In his closing statement, Ferencz told the court: “We ask this court to affirm by international 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 went on to help establish the International Criminal Court in 1998. Reflecting on what he had learned about human nature, he insisted perpetrators of atrocity were rarely monsters: “These are not crimes committed by devils with horns. These are committed by educated, well-intentioned, patriotic people.” He remained committed to the idea that reconciliation, not vengeance, was the only lasting answer. “Don’t give up,” he said. “Law is always better than war.”

Source: BBC News