The Jewish Learning Institute has released an excerpt from the final interview of Benjamin B. Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials, conducted at the National Jewish Retreat in August 2022. Born as Berel Ferencz in Transylvania and raised in New York City, Mr. Ferencz passed away on Friday, April 7, at 103.
As the United States prepared to prosecute Nazi crimes in World War II’s closing stages, the Pentagon tracked down an obscure corporal named Benjamin B. Ferencz. His research for a legal book on war crimes while at Harvard Law School would prove crucial at the Nuremberg trials.
Mr. Ferencz soon became the lead prosecutor against the notorious Einsatzgruppen, collectively responsible for the mass murder of over a million Jews. He also prosecuted German industrialists who used slave labor from concentration camps to build Hitler’s war machine.
In his last public interview, at age 102, the indomitable Mr. Ferencz was interviewed at JLI’s National Jewish Retreat in Miami last year, where he recounted his role in the Nuremberg trials, from collecting evidence of the Holocaust to prosecuting Nazi criminals. “I entered the trials in sorrow,” he said, “and in the hope that, here, we would reveal the deliberate murder of millions of men, women, and children.”
May his memory be a blessing and an inspiration for generations to come.
Watch the interview with Ben Ferencz:
Thank you for your service counselor.
The children of Holocaust survivors salute you.
Jay Sorid, Esq.
He must have felt very frustrated when told he can only choose 22 murderers out of 3000!!!!! (towards end of interview)
OMG how dare the USA let these evil barbarians go!!!
Hopefully he passed their names and the evidence on to Israel. I guess we’ll never know.