Ben Ferencz was born in present-day Romania in 1920. When he was ten months old, his family emigrated to the United States, eventually settling in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City. They were among the last waves of immigrants to come from Europe before restrictive quota laws were passed in the U.S., culminating in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Ferencz joined the U.S. Army. In early April 1945, while searching for a supposed German headquarters, his unit in the U.S. 4th Armored Division came upon Ohrdruf, one of at least 130 satellite camps surrounding the Buchenwald concentration camp. There, Ferencz encountered piles of dead bodies - prisoners the Germans had left behind as they fled.
“It can’t be real,” Ferencz remembered thinking to himself. “But, it was true, and I knew, of course, it was true.”
After the war ended, Ferencz was sent to examine a trove of captured German files that detailed the activities of the Einsatzgruppen, Nazi paramilitary units who both supervised and carried out mass killings of Jewish civilians in Eastern Europe. Using the Germans’ own documentation, he began tallying the number of civilians who had been murdered.
“I had the proof in my hands,” Ferencz explained. “And I began to add them up. And, when I reached a million, I said, ‘That’s enough. That’s enough.’”
The evidence Ferencz collected was a key to the successful prosecution of 24 Nazi-SS officers during the Einsatzgruppen case of the Nuremberg Trials, in which Ferencz served as chief prosecutor.
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