The Nuremberg trials and their drama are familiar enough to the world, but not the face and the work of the 27-year-old American Army lawyer and investigator Benjamin Ferencz, charged with the task of collecting evidence for the Nuremberg prosecutions.
The terrors of entering the just-liberated camps with their hellish scenes—the film provides striking footage, more extensive than the usual documentary clips, of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower doing just that, with Gen. Omar Bradley just behind him—caused him, he tells the filmmakers, to create a self-defense mechanism. The whole scene wasn't real, he told himself—it was "just a case," one of many to get through, in camp after camp. He would become chief prosecutor of a special German unit, the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units operating on the Eastern front. He found the report of their daily accomplishments, which Germans meticulously recorded—a typical page of which is shown on screen, detailing how many Jewish children were killed, how many men and women had been murdered on a particular date. He counted. "When I got to over a million I stopped counting." (Wall Street Journal).
Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals
Visit Benjamin Ferencz (above) http://www.benferencz.org/
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| Benjamin B. Ferencz (left) with Gen Dwight Eisenhower his hand is on the box (Germany, 1945). |
Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals
Tuesday, Nov. 15, 9-11 p.m. EST on PBS, whose dates and times vary; check local listings.
The Contenders
Fridays, 8-9:30 p.m. EST on C-Span
Visit Benjamin Ferencz (above) http://www.benferencz.org/
