Free The Nazi Hunters by Andrew Nagorski Page B

commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the special execution squads deployed on the Eastern Front
    W earing a sailor cap, a short-sleeve blue shirt, and navy pants held up by black suspenders, Benjamin Ferencz sat on a lounge chair outside a modest one-bedroom bungalow in Delray Beach, Florida, looking like a typical retiree when I visited him there in early 2013.
    But there was nothing typical about this ninety-three-year-old who stood just barely five feet tall when he got up to flex his biceps, showing off the results of his daily workouts at the gym. Or, more significantly, when he recounted his memories of going from Harvard Law School, where he was a scholarship student from New York’s rough neighborhood aptly known as Hell’s Kitchen, to getting off his landing craft at Omaha Beach, finding himself in water that came up to his waist while for most others it came up to their knees.
    And, especially, when he described how, through a combination of luck and persistence, he ended up, at age twenty-seven, in Nuremberg as the chief prosecutor in what the Associated Press called, without any hyperbole, “the biggest murder trial in history.” Yet, even more than the Dachau trials, it was a trial that was so overshadowed by the International Military Tribunal’s headline-grabbing proceedings against the major Nazi leaders that it usually gets at most passing mention in the history books.
    Born in Transylvania into a Hungarian Jewish family that came to the United States when he was an infant, Ferencz was always a scrapper, driven by his passions and not intimidated by any challenge. Living in the basement of one of the apartment buildings in Hell’s Kitchen, where his father worked as a janitor, he was initially rejected by the public school both because, at six, he looked too small and because he spoke only Yiddish. But after attending various schools in other parts of the city, he was singled out as one of the “gifted boys,” became the first person in his family to go to college, and then went on to get his law degree at Harvard, never having to pay tuition.
    When Corporal Ferencz was transferred from the infantry to the Judge Advocate Section of General Patton’s Third Army at the end of 1944, he was thrilled, particularly when he was told that he would be part of a new war crimes team. As U.S. troops were fighting their way into Germany, there were numerous reports of Allied fliers who had parachuted into German territory and then were murdered by local residents. Ferencz was assigned the task of investigating such cases and carrying out arrests as needed. “The only authority I had was the .45 caliber gun around my waist and the fact that the U.S. Army was swarming all over town,” he noted. “Under such circumstances, Germans are very obedient and I do not recall ever encountering resistance.”
    Despite his size, Ferencz brought with him more than his share of New York–style chutzpah. Later, when General Patton’s headquarters was located on the outskirts of Munich, he was on latrine duty on the day Marlene Dietrich showed up for a performance for the troops. As the junior member of the team, he was told to make sure that she was notdisturbed in her room as she took a bath first. “After waiting a reasonable time—to be sure that she was at least in the tub—and eager to do my duty, I simply walked into the room where she sat calmly immersed only in her splendor,” he recalled. He must have been rattled a bit by his own audacity, since, while retreating, he said: “Oh, pardon me, Sir.”
    Dietrich was merely amused when he apologized, laughing particularly at his use of “Sir.” When she learned he was a Harvard-trained lawyer, she invited him to join her for lunch with the officers. Since Ferencz was an enlisted man, he suggested that she explain that he was an old friend from Europe, which she happily did. As a result, he went from latrine duty to sitting opposite the superstar at lunch. Before she