Published: 14 April 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Vic Alhadeff pays tribute to the man who led the prosecution of the leaders of the Nazis’ mobile killing squads and later helped establish the International Criminal Court.
There’s a small pantheon of 21st-century Jewish giants whose commitment to the fraught area of human rights expanded the frontiers of knowledge and compassion while plumbing the depths of how low humanity can go, leaving the world infinitely richer for their extraordinary contributions.
These towering figures include Sir Nicholas Winton, the British stockbroker and humanitarian who masterminded the rescue of 669 Jewish children from the Nazis, raising funds to underwrite the transports and finding British families to foster the young refugees. Remarkably, his endeavours remained unknown until 1988, when his wife Grete discovered a scrap book he had compiled, containing the names and photographs of the rescued children.
Also in this elite group would be Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for defending “human rights and peace around the world”, and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, whose book Man’s Search For Meaning – informed by three years in Auschwitz and Dachau - is acknowledged as a landmark exploration of the quest for meaning as a motivational force for humankind.
Then there is Benjamin Berell Ferencz, who died in his sleep last week at the age of 103 in Florida. (At the age of 100 he was doing 100 press-ups a day.) Diminutive in stature, he laconically said of himself: “I was very small. Five-foot-two at the height of my height. It kept me out of the (US) Air Force. I wanted to be a pilot. I couldn't reach the pedals. But by chance, I had a very good education.”
The self-deprecating reference was to his law degree from Harvard University.
Incredibly, at the age of 27 and despite having never prosecuted a single court case, Ferencz was appointed chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trial in 1947. With his razor-sharp intellect and forensic approach, he prosecuted 22 leaders of the Einsatzgruppen (the Nazis’ mobile killing squads), which were responsible for the murder of over one million people, mostly Jews, predominantly through mass shootings. The unprecedented case was described by the Associated Press as "the biggest murder trial in history”.
