Over his head, thankfully not out of his depth
Ever been put in an awkward position by your boss? One of those “Why me?” “You weren’t there to defend yourself.” moments? Let’s talk about Benjamin Ferencz.
Born in Transylvania in 1920, Ferencz, who was the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials, emigrated with his family to the United States when he was an infant to escape anti-Jewish pogroms.
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1943, Ferencz enlisted in the U.S. Army and was given the job of anti-aircraft artillery gunner.
“In their typical [Army] brilliance, being a Harvard Law School graduate and an expert on war crimes, they assigned me to clean the latrines in the artillery and do every other filthy thing they could give me,” Ferencz reminisced about the Army’s odd job placement in a 2016 interview with The Washington Post.
Tell me THAT doesn’t square with the Army assignment system.
The outspoken Ferencz, who barely registered over five feet tall, eventually rose to the rank of sergeant as a member of Gen. George Patton’s Third Army. Action during the Normandy invasion followed, as did breaking through the Maginot and Siegfried lines, crossing the Rhine and bitter fighting in the Battle of the Bulge.
That list of battles echoes the old saying “it’s not the size of the boy in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the boy.” Short, yes, but obviously able to pull his weight.
After Ferencz’s honorable discharge in 1945, Gen. Telford Taylor, then the chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials, recruited Ferencz to return to Germany and work with a team of investigators tasked with uncovering the horrors of the Nazi regime.
Tasked with gathering credible evidence of Nazi war crimes for the Army’s War Crimes Branch, Ferencz encountered the depths of human depravity. The Germans maintained meticulous death registries at the camps of Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg and Ebensee. These registries, which Ferencz was ordered to collect, contained the names of millions of victims.
It was there that Ferencz and his colleagues discovered the dossiers of the Nazi mobile death squads, the Einsatzgruppen — roving extermination squads that targeted Jews, Roma, homosexuals and political dissidents in Eastern Europe. In the subsequent trial, the International Military Tribunal determined that nearly two million Jews were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen.
At this point Ferencz was a 27 year old law school graduate with no trial experience, placed in charge of Nurnburg murder trials under the full world’s scrutiny.
All 22 men prosecuted by Ferencz were convicted. Most were sentenced to death. Military.com
His work was considered so significant that his family was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal this week in his name. Ferencz passed three years back at 103.
A tip of the hat to Jeff LPH for this story.
Category: We Remember, WWII
