NUREMBERG TRIALS: 'NO ONE SHOWED ANY SIGN OF REMORSE'

Defense lawyers and prosecution at the Nuremberg Trial IX (Einsatzgruppen Trial / Einsatzgruppen-Prozess).
From left to right: Friedrich Bergold (attorney for defendant Ernst Biberstein),
Benjamin B. Ferencz (chief prosecutor), and Rudolf Aschenauer (attorney for defendant Otto Ohlendorf).

On 29 September 1947, the "biggest murder trial in history" began. Seventy years on, the chief prosecutor, Ben Ferencz, told the BBC how he fought to bring 22 killers to justice.

"I wrote somewhere that I had peered into hell – I think hell would be paradise compared to what I saw."

In 2017, Ben Ferencz told the BBC about witnessing harrowing scenes at the Buchenwald concentration camp at the end of World War Two – an experience that led to his becoming, aged 27, the youngest US prosecutor at the war crimes trials in Nuremberg.

A Hungarian-Jewish New Yorker who signed up for the Army as soon as he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1943, Ferencz landed on the beaches at Normandy. Later, as a war crimes investigator, he was one of the first US troops to enter the newly liberated Nazi death camps. He preferred not to discuss those memories, as he told Zeinab Badawi in 2017. "I don't like to talk about it much because I have difficulty controlling my own emotions."

Yet even at the age of 97, he was able to recount what he'd seen in detail. "I can describe it to you quite vividly because the recollection is very firm in my mind. But at the same time, you'll never understand what it was like because the rational human mind can't quite grasp it." He remembered seeing bodies on the ground as he entered Buchenwald, and prisoners so emaciated that they were "skeletons dressed in rags".

When Ferencz returned to New York in 1945, the Pentagon (the headquarters of the US Department of Defence) asked if he could help with the trials taking place in Nuremberg. "The United States particularly felt that the International Military Tribunal against Hermann Göring was just a camera shot of a small sampling," he said.

"And in order to really understand how a civilised country like Germany could commit and tolerate the type of atrocities which were committed, you should understand the position of the doctors who performed medical experiments, the lawyers and judges who perverted the law, the SS murderers, of course, who did the actual killings, the industrialists who were working people to death. All of these were specific groups."

Ferencz was assigned to "take a sampling from each of these groups" to help explain their actions. He flew to Berlin, where he and a team of about 50 researchers scoured the Nazi archives for evidence of the crimes committed by Germans from all walks of life. 

Then his team made an unexpected discovery. "One of my researchers… came upon the daily reports from these special extermination squads whose job it was to kill, without pity or remorse, every single Jewish man, woman and child they could lay their hands on… and any other perceived or suspected opponents of the Reich."

- Author: Fiona Macdonald, BBC

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