World History
Related: About this forumBenjamin Ferencz 'Last Surviving Prosecutor WW2 Nuremberg Trials' War Crimes - US Lawyer, WW2 Veteran, DDay, The Bulge
'I Am the Last Surviving Prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials,' (2021), 15 mins.
---------
- Benjamin Ferencz ( March 11, 1920 - April 7, 2023) passed away in 2023 after this documentary short was made in Ben's Fla home by young filmmaker Ashton Gluckman in 2021.
Ben Ferencz lived a remarkable life dedicated to peace and justice. ⚖
---------
Ben Ferencz was just in his twenties, had landed on the beaches of Normandy, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and liberated various Nazi concentration camps when he became responsible for prosecuting members of the Einsatzgruppen death units that killed over over one million innocent people during the Nazi invasion of Russia.
----------
- Wiki. Benjamin Berell Ferencz (March 11, 1920 April 7, 2023) was an American lawyer. He was an investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II and the chief prosecutor[1] for the United States Army at the Einsatzgruppen trial, one of the 12 subsequent Nuremberg trials held by US authorities at Nuremberg, Germany. When the Einsatzgruppen reports were discovered, Ferencz pushed for a trial based on their evidence. When confronted with a lack of staff and resources, he personally volunteered to serve as the prosecutor.[2]
Later he became an advocate of international rule of law and for the establishment of an International Criminal Court. From 1985 to 1996, he was an adjunct professor of international law at Pace University...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Ferencz
- Ben Ferencz, 60 Minutes CBS News, April 2023. The last Nuremberg prosecutor has died at age 103.
appalachiablue
(43,692 posts)- Einsatzgruppen Trial, Wiki. ed.
The United States of America vs. Otto Ohlendorf, et al., commonly known as the Einsatzgruppen trial, was the 9th of the 12 "subsequent Nuremberg trials" for war crimes and crimes against humanity after the end of World War II between 1947 and 1948. The accused were 24 former SS leaders who, as commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, were responsible for the mass killing of more than a million victims in the Eastern Front.[1]
The Einsatzgruppen trial was held by United States authorities at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg in the American occupation zone before US military courts, not before the International Military Tribunal. All of the accused were found guilty: 14 were sentenced to death by hanging and 8 received prison sentences ranging from life imprisonment to time served. Two were only convicted of being a member of an illegal organization, one committed suicide before the arraignment, and one was removed from the trial for medical reasons. Otto Ohlendorf, Erich Naumann, Paul Blobel, and Werner Braune were executed in 1951 while the others sentenced to death had their sentences commuted.
* The trial marked the first use of the term genocide in legal context, being used by both the prosecution and by the judges in the verdict.[2]
- The case. The Einsatzgruppen were SS mobile death squads, operating behind the front line in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. From 1941 to 1945, they murdered around 2 million people; 1.3 million Jews, up to 250,000 Romani, and around 500,000 so-called "partisans", people with disabilities, political commissars, Slavs, homosexuals and others.[3][4] The 24 defendants in this trial were all commanders of these Einsatzgruppen units and faced charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The tribunal stated in its judgment:
.. in this case the defendants are not simply accused of planning or directing wholesale killings through channels. They are not charged with sitting in an office hundreds and thousands of miles away from the slaughter. It is asserted with particularity that these men were in the field actively superintending, controlling, directing, and taking an active part in the bloody harvest.[5]
The judges in this case, heard before Military Tribunal II-A, were Michael Musmanno (presiding judge & naval officer) from Penn., John J. Speight from Ala., & Richard D. Dixon from No. Carolina. The chief of counsel for the prosecution was Telford Taylor; the *chief prosecutor for this case was Benjamin B. Ferencz...
-More + Photos,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen_trial