Benjamin Ferencz

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Benjamin Ferencz 2012 in courtroom 600 , where the Nuremberg trials took place from 1945 to 1949

Benjamin Berell Ferencz (born March 11, 1920 in Nagysomkút , Maramures County , Hungary ) is an American lawyer . He was chief prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen trial , one of the twelve follow-up trials in the context of the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War . He is the last surviving chief prosecutor of all trials at the time. Ferencz lives in Florida , his wife Gertrud died there in 2019, he has four grown children.

Youth and education

Benjamin Ferencz was born in a small village in Transylvania , which was still Hungarian at the time . After the First World War , Hungary had to surrender the area to Romania ( Treaty of Trianon ); From then on, the Hungarian Jewish population got worse and worse (→ more here ). His family emigrated to the United States when he was ten months old. Ferencz grew up in a crime-ridden problem area of Manhattan and the Bronx . He attended Townsend Harris High School for gifted boys, studied at City College of New York and received his law degree from Sheldon Glueck at Harvard Law School in 1943 .

Act

Benjamin Ferencz (1947)
Benjamin Ferencz (center) in the Einsatzgruppen trial (1947/48)

Ferencz was drafted as a simple soldier and fought in an anti-aircraft unit in France in 1944 when he was ordered to set up a “War Crimes Branch” in the “Judge Advocate Section”. He collected evidence of war crimes committed by the Germans. "As far as I know, I was the first in the American army to deal with war crimes," said Ferencz himself, looking back. He investigated lynching of Allied pilots and investigated in German concentration camps immediately after the liberation. So in Ohrdruf , in Buchenwald , in Flossenbürg , in Mauthausen-Gusen and in Ebensee .

In the immediate post-war period , war crimes proceedings were carried out in Dachau by an improvised military court with his assistance.

In 1945, after the liberation of the Ebensee satellite camp, Ferencz observed how prisoners beat up a concentration camp guard and burned him alive in the crematorium .

At the end of 1945 he left the army with the rank of sergeant . He returned to New York to work as a lawyer.

Task Force Process

Shortly afterwards he was persuaded by Telford Taylor to return to Germany in order to find evidence for the indictment of the Nuremberg Trials as the civil leader of a group of fifty people, mostly refugees from National Socialism. One of his employees discovered the Leitz folder with the SS incident reports from the USSR . When Ferencz insisted on Taylor making the mass murder documented in these reports the subject of further proceedings, he, then 27 years old, was appointed chief prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen trial. All 24 defendants were found guilty.

The Task Force Process, officially The United States of America vs. Otto Ohlendorf , et al. , was the ninth of the twelve "war crimes trials" held by the Allies in occupied Germany after the Second World War .

In 2002 Lutz Hachmeister, together with Landsberg historian Anton Posset, produced a documentary film about the historical significance of the Landsberg correctional facility and the war criminals topic, which is emotionally much discussed locally in Landsberg. Benjamin Ferencz was interviewed for the first time in many years and commented on Alfried Krupp's trial .

Further career

Ferencz stayed in Germany afterwards and worked on reparation issues in the 'Legal Aid Department' at the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization as its general director, and after its merger with the United Restitution Organization in 1955 . He took part in the reparations negotiations between the Federal Republic of Germany, the State of Israel and the Jewish Claims Conference for the JRSO ; on September 10, 1952, the Luxembourg Agreement was signed.

After his return to the USA in 1957, he opened a law firm with his partner Telford Taylor, where he worked until 1970. He also taught at Pace University in New York and wrote books on international law .

In 1997 and 1998 Ferencz took part in the negotiations on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court , which resulted in the establishment of the International Criminal Court . He also campaigned intensively for this in the following years.

At the invitation of the chief prosecutor, Ferencz symbolically opened the first plea for the prosecution before the International Criminal Court in The Hague in January 2009, thus placing the work of the court in the direct tradition of the Nuremberg trials. For Ferencz it is a concern that has grown out of his personal war experience that the use of armed force to achieve political goals, regardless of who is punished “as an international and national crime”.

In 2007 he said in a ZDF interview that " Guantánamo will be just as connected to torture by the Americans as Auschwitz is to Germany."

In 2009 Ferencz was awarded the Erasmus Prize together with Antonio Cassese . On May 27, 2010, he received the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his lifelong commitment to international law . In 2013 he and the International Criminal Court received the Dag Hammarskjöld Medal of Honor .

Awards (selection)

Fonts (selection)

  • New Legal Foundations for Global Survival: Security Through the Security Council. Oceana 1994, ISBN 0-379-21207-2 .
  • With K. Keyes Jr: Planethood. Vision Books 1988. Reprint 1991, ISBN 0-915972-21-2 .
  • A Common Sense Guide to World Peace. Oceana 1985.
  • Enforcing International Law: A Way to World Peace. Oceana 1983.
  • Less Than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation. Foreword Telford Taylor . Harvard UP, Cambridge 1979, ISBN 0-253-21530-7 .
    • Reward of horror. Denied compensation for Jewish forced laborers. A chapter in post-war German history. Frankfurt am Main: Campus 1981.
  • An International Criminal Court: A Step Toward World Peace. Oceana 1980, ISBN 0-379-20389-8 .
  • Defining International Aggression: The Search for World Peace. Oceana 1975, ISBN 0-379-00271-X .

literature

  • Constantin Goschler , Marcus Böick, Julia Reus (eds.): War crimes, restitution, prevention. From the papers of Benjamin B. Ferencz . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2019, ISBN 978-3-525-31116-5 ( Open Access document collection ).
  • Philipp Gut : Ben Ferencz, witness of the century. Chief Prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials and passionate fighter for justice . Piper Publishing House. Munich 2020. ISBN 978-3-492-05985-5 .

Movie

Web links

Commons : Benjamin Ferencz  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Deutschlandfunk March 11, 2020: The tireless advocate for peace .
  2. ↑ benferenz.org
  3. ^ A b c d Daniel Stahl, Annette Weinke : Peace through law. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . January 18, 2014, p. V2 9.
  4. ↑ questia.com
  5. ^ Philipp Gut: Witness of the century Ben Ferencz . Piper Verlag, 2020, ISBN 978-3-492-05985-5 , pp. 21 .
  6. ↑ a b c oral history interview with Benjamin Ferencz. In: Sources on the history of human rights. Working Group on Human Rights in the 20th Century, December 12, 2013, accessed on December 20, 2016 .
  7. ^ Philipp Gut: Witness of the century Ben Ferencz . Piper Verlag, 2020, ISBN 978-3-492-05985-5 , pp. 57-60 .
  8. ^ Philipp Gut: Witness of the century Ben Ferencz . Piper Verlag, 2020, ISBN 978-3-492-05985-5 , pp. 64-85 .
  9. ↑ Sebastian Gubernator: Nuremberg became his fate. In: Welt am Sonntag. October 7, 2018, p. 6.
  10. ↑ The prison. Landsberg and the emergence of the republic
  11. ↑ http://www.hmr-produktion.de/filme/das-gefaengnis.html
  12. ^ B. Ferencz: Telford Taylor: Pioneer of International Criminal Law. In: Columbia Journal of Transnational Law. 37, No. 3, 1999, pp. 661-664.
  13. ↑ The Chief Prosecutor. German documentary film 2013.
  14. ↑ Frontal21 March 20, 2007: Former US prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials: Torture in Guantanamo - war crimes on behalf of the government? / “The war on terror breaks international law” .
  15. ↑ a b Passionate fighter for international law. Federal Foreign Office, May 27, 2010, accessed March 22, 2011 .
  16. ↑ sueddeutsche.de / Knud von Harbou : Review
personal data
SURNAME Ferencz, Benjamin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ferencz, Benjamin B.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Nagysomkút , Maramures County , Hungary