Leaders of the House and Senate honored the lead prosecutor of one of the Nuremberg trials with a posthumous Congressional Gold Medal, the body’s highest civilian honor, on Tuesday to mark Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Benjamin Ferencz, who died in 2023, was the lead prosecutor of the Einsatzgruppen trial, one of the subsequent Nuremberg trials, which convicted 24 Nazis for the murders of more than 1 million people, including Jews, Romani and other victims of the SS on the Eastern Front.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said that recognition of Ferencz had “long been due” for his role in prosecuting “the largest murder trial in human history.”
“The Congressional Gold Medal is the highest civilian honor that Congress can bestow upon anyone,” Johnson said. “Today we’re proud to confer that great honor on Benjamin Ferencz for his life of servant leadership and his courage in the face of evil.”
Born in 1920 in what is today Romania, Ferencz emigrated to the United States with his Hungarian Jewish family when he was 10-months-old. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he served in the U.S. Army during World War II and was recruited as the youngest prosecutor at Nuremberg, aged 27.
In 2022, a bipartisan group of legislators introduced a bill to award Ferencz the Congressional Gold Medal for his lifetime of service dedicated to his motto: “law, not war.”
Tuesday’s ceremony to award the medal included lawmakers, members of the Trump administration, an Army color guard representing units that liberated concentration camps, a military band and more than 25 Holocaust survivors.
Sarah Bloomfield, director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, read an acceptance letter from Donald Ferencz on behalf of his father.
“My dad came to the United States as part of those huddled masses yearning to be free, and his life exemplified that it’s not so much where you come from as where you’re going that counts,” Bloomfield read.
“Though he never saw the gold medal itself, he knew that it had been officially authorized, for which he was profoundly grateful,” she read.
Leaders from both parties marked the occasion by warning of the contemporary resurgence of Jew-hatred in the United States and around the world.
“The effort to combat antisemitism and Holocaust denial cannot be a Democratic issue or a Republican issue. It is an American issue,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). “We must all commit to crushing antisemitism, burying it in the ground and making sure that it never rises again.”
Other lawmakers who spoke included some of the co-sponsors of the bill to award Ferencz the medal, Reps. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) and Lois Frankel (D-Fla.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), as well as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
Representatives from the Trump administration in attendance included Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Leo Terrell, leader of the Justice Department’s joint task force to combat antisemitism.
“Ben Ferencz was living proof that even in the face of humanity’s greatest horrors, one person can choose justice over vengeance and law over violence,” Frankel said. “From the courtroom at Nuremberg to his lifelong fight for human rights, he helped build the very foundation of international justice. At a time when hatred and antisemitism are on the rise, his legacy is not just history. It is a call to action.”
