I genuinely believe that this man is one of the greatest Americans in this entire country's dark history. He is up there with John Brown. I will not give you a summary.
Instead, I will give you Ferencz's entire life story.
Ferencz wasn’t a prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal, the trial which everyone knows about. Instead, he was a chief prosecutor at one of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials.
The Subsequent Nuremberg Trials were a series of major war crimes trials conducted after the International Military Tribunal. There were differences between the two.
The Nuremberg Trials which people know about were conducted by an international tribunal consisting of Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The Subsequent Nuremberg Trials were conducted exclusively by the United States.
There had been plans for more international trials, but worsening relations between the West and the East made that impossible. However, the major Allied powers agreed that they were still obligated to prosecute suspected war criminals in their respective occupation zones of Germany.
Now, some people know that many war criminals were treated leniently, ignored, or even outright protected for political or other reasons. That said, there were still hundreds of trials conducted against thousands of defendants.
The British conducted most of their minor war crimes trials in Hamburg, the French in Rastatt, the Americans on the grounds of the former Dachau concentration camp (they found that the prison bunker was convenient for housing suspects), and the Soviets in various parts of Eastern Germany.
Shortly after the international tribunal issued its verdicts, the U.S. high command established the Office of the Chief of Counsel for War Crimes (OCCWC), a war crimes investigation team. The OCCWC was instructed to prepare major war crimes trials in the American occupation zone.
The likes of Dachau Trials handled mostly concentration camp guards and soldiers who murdered POWs. Sometimes, more important war criminals were tried in those trials.
The OCCWC was different; their sole purpose was to pursue those more important war criminals. They were supposed to pursue of the more important people who'd managed to avoid prosecution in the likes of the Dachau Trials.
At the time, Ferencz was a nobody. The only thing special about him was his height.