News about Ben Ferencz

Nearly 80 years old, Ben Ferencz could still remember watching in terror as concentration camp prisoners days after their liberation, captured an SS guard and spit him out alive in one of the Nazis' own ovens. 'Not all of the prisoners were helpless,' he told me. They apprehended one of the guards and beat him with their fists.' Somebody stole one of the trays they used to shovel people into the oven from the crematorium. He was tied to it and tossed in the oven, but not enough to warm him up. 'They pulled him out again, beat him up again, put him into the hospital, and then burn him up again, about two to three times before he was well-cooked.'

Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor from Nuremberg's German war criminal justice scandals, died in Florida at the age of 103. Ferencz, a Harvard-educated lawyer, secured the convictions of several German officers who commanded roving death squads during the war. When he first appeared as a prosecutor in Nuremberg, where Nazi prisoners faced a string of lawsuits for their crimes, he was only 27 years old, left. The Einsatzgruppen Massacre, inset center, was a major focus of the trials. It was one of the most brutal and systematic examples of Nazi genocide during World War II, resulting in the deaths of nearly 34,000 Jews.