The Einsatzgruppen Trial was prosecuted by Benjamin Ferencz, who died (at the age of 103) just last April. Without Ferencz, it’s quite likely that none of them ever would have been identified or prosecuted.
Ferencz enlisted in the army right after graduating Harvard law school in 1943. He was slotted as a clerk-typist (he already was a skilled typist) but when he got to Europe he was re-assigned to anti-aircraft artillery.
In the military, good typists are always in short supply and it wasn’t long before he was reassigned to Patton’s HQ in his original MOS. Because he also could speak fluent German, as the war drew to a close, he was sent around with teams trying to document Nazi war crimes.
As he tells it, the war had ended, that assignment reached a conclusion, and his enlistment was expired, he snuck on a plane back to the states. Some weeks later an officer from the Pentagon came to see him in New York to ask him to go back to Germany for one more job. He would go back as a civilian but would wear a the rank of bird colonel to assist in the Nuremberg prosecutions.
Prosecutor Telford Taylor sent Ferencz (and a team of about 50) on a mission to gather prosecutable evidence against certain Nazis, but he found something that completely redirected his efforts. One of his team came across a stack of accounting ledgers in which the Einsatzgruppen (who no one outside the Nazi elites ever had even heard of) were reporting to Himmler (and hence to Hitler) exactly — EXACTLY — how many Jews that were murdering.
Ferencz sat down with these records and an adding machine and when he reached a million murdered Jews, he decided that he had to go after the Einsatzgruppen instead. He went back to Taylor, who said they already were stretched too thin to go after them. The only way the Einsatzgruppen could be tried in addition to the Nazis already slated for prosecution was if Ferencz himself would take on the case.
On the negative side, Ferencz had never tried a case in his life. On the plus side, while at Harvard he had law clerked for Sheldon Glueck, considered by some to be the leading authority on war crimes. So he probably knew more about war crimes than any other prosecutor at Nuremberg.
All 24 of his defendants were convicted.
Benjamin Ferencz, all five-foot-two of him, making arguments in his opening statements, and in the doing, created some of the most memorable expressions in the history of juris prudence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b67B-MoKG_o
And without Ferencz taking command of the situation, it is unlikely any of them ever would have come to trial.
This is very interesting. Thanks for posting.
I was having a tough time deciding earlier today whether to post about this execution or about the execution of someone for killing a duke close in line to the restored French throne.
Thank you for the info and link.