Honor Ben Ferencz: The Senate must advance a bill awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the Nuremberg prosecutor

Daily News Editorial Board, New York Daily News
·2 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

In his 102 years, Ben Ferencz has lived an extraordinary life. Now, soon — we hope very soon — he will have an extraordinary honor from a thankful nation.

As regular readers of this column are aware, Ben was brought to New York as a baby in 1920 when his family fled anti-Semitism in Europe. A New York kid, he excelled at school and went to the all-boys Townsend Harris High School (from which he never graduated because he skipped the swim test), then City College, then law school. The army came calling and back to Europe he went, this time not as a persecuted refugee Jew, but as a liberator in Patton’s army, freeing a continent from Nazi rule.

After the war, he was a prosecutor at Nuremberg, leading the case against the Einsatzgruppen, the Germans’ mobile killing squads, which murdered more than a million Jews in Soviet lands. He won the case with all 22 Nazis in the dock convicted. The top men, SS generals, swung from the hangman’s noose. It was his first and only trial, the biggest murder trial in history.

In the decades that followed, Ferencz taught and wrote and advocated for justice and for the creation of the International Criminal Court. The years have left him the last of the Nuremberg prosecutors, a group that established for all time that might does not make right and that governments and people will be held to account for crimes against humanity.

Now, the Congress of his adopted home is preparing to grant him the Congressional Gold Medal, a rare honor. The House passed the bill by acclamation in May and today, New Yorkers Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, along with Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, will be introducing the bill in the upper chamber. It demands speedy passage. Then on to President Biden to sign into law.

It won’t be Ben’s first honor. In 2019, the new co-ed Townsend Harris High School sent him a long-delayed diploma, letting bygones be bygone about that swim test.