Heroic Nuremberg War Crimes Trial proseutor Benjamin Berell Ferencz is honored with a Post Office in Delray Beach.
From Sun Sentinel:
A ‘life fighting crimes against humanity’: Delray post office renamed for Nazi prosecutor at Nuremberg
Benjamin Berell Ferencz, who died at 103 in 2023, had made a permanent home in the Delray Beach community of Kings Point.
At a time of rising antisemitism across the world, local officials renamed a Delray Beach post office on Monday in honor of a former resident who prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg and spent the rest of his life pursuing civil rights, justice and human dignity.
A plaque to the right of the entry doors designates the United States Postal Service branch, at 14280 S. Military Trail, as the Benjamin Berell Ferencz Post Office Building, in remembrance of the pioneering attorney’s work.
Ferencz, who died at 103 in 2023, had made a permanent home in the Delray Beach community of Kings Point beginning in 2019.
During a ceremony Monday at the post office, Ferencz’s youngest daughter, Nina Dale, remembered him as a physically small man with a mighty intellect and ferocious commitment to the law. She said he was 5 feet tall and had to stand on a milk crate “to be seen over the podium” when, at only 27, he addressed the court at the Nuremberg Trials. Twenty-two Nazis were convicted under his prosecution.
He spent the rest of his life fighting crimes against humanity,” Dale said, and he loved the U.S. postal system for its ability to ferry his correspondence around the world.
U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel (D-West Palm Beach) began the process of renaming the post office for Ferencz in 2023 and succeeded in having her bill approved by Congress. The bill was signed by President Joe Biden on Jan. 2, 2025.
Ferencz was born in 1920 to a Hungarian Jewish family in a town in the Carpathian Mountains in today’s Romania. That same year, his family, fleeing persecution, moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Ferencz graduated from Harvard Law School in 1943 and enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was hired as a war crimes investigator and visited concentration camps during the World War II liberation to document Nazi crimes.
“Camps like Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Dachau are vividly imprinted in my mind’s eye,” Ferencz told the Florida Jewish Journal in 2022. “Even today, when I close my eyes, I witness a deadly vision I can never forget.”
He became the chief prosecutor in the trial of The Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi shooting squads that murdered more than a million Jews, Roma, Communists and Soviet citizens. All the defendants were convicted, and 14 were sentenced to death.
In the 1970s, he became a major proponent of an international tribunal to prosecute political leaders who commit war crimes and other severe abuses. The International Criminal Court was finally established in 2002 and is based in The Hague, Netherlands.
Many wonder what Ferencz would say if he saw the alarming rates of antisemitism in 2025. Several recent incidents stick out: In May, two Israeli embassy staffers were killed in front of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. And earlier this month, a man threw firebombs at a march honoring Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado.
In 2024, the Anti-Defamation League found 9,354 antisemitic incidents across the United States, the highest number on record since the civil rights organization began tracking incidents 46 years ago.
“We’re living in very difficult times,” Lonny Wilk, deputy regional director of ADL Florida, told the audience on Monday.
But Ferencz might have responded with characteristic bullishness. Although dictators were growing in power across the world in his later years, he remained optimistic about the future of humanity. Among his memorable pieces of advice, according to the International Criminal Court Project, which aims to expand knowledge about the court:
“Never give up, never give up, never give up.”
2 comments:
A "Nazi prosecutor" would be someone who was a Nazi and a prosecutor. I think they meant "a man who prosecuted "Nazis." The average brain size in the USA has decreased over the last decade.
Kenny/Pete, following that logic, a "dog walker" is someone who is a dog and a walker.
Furthermore, "Studies in the United States, such as one conducted by researchers at UC Davis Health, have found that the average human brain size has been increasing over time." (JAMA Neurology)
You're just making it up as you go along, aren't you?
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