Benjamin Berell Ferencz Congressional Gold Medal Act

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of H.R. 6015, the Benjamin Berell Ferencz Congressional Gold Medal Act. I thank Congresswoman Frankel and the numerous original cosponsors for their work on this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, Ben Ferencz was the last surviving prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials. A few minutes ago, we were reflecting on how few Army Rangers we have left from World War II. Truly, the Greatest Generation is passing before us.

Ben Ferencz is one of the few people remaining on Earth who had a front row seat to witness the horrors brought about by Nazi Germany before and during the war. As we witness the horrors now being carried out in Ukraine, it has never been more important for the world to hear his story.

Ben Ferencz's family fled to New York City to escape Romania's persecution of the Hungarian Jews. As a young man, Ferencz studied at the City College of New York and attended Harvard Law on a scholarship. After graduating from Harvard in 1943, Ferencz joined the U.S. Army. Like so many Americans, this was a decision that put him face to face with the potential of death and face to face with the worst case of persecution and genocide in history, the Holocaust.

After 2 years at Camp Davis in Holly Ridge, North Carolina, Ferencz was transferred to the headquarters of General Patton's Third Army. There he was assigned to a team tasked with setting up a war crimes branch, collecting the evidence of the horrors that had been carried out at the recently liberated concentration camps. One of those liberators in April 1945 was my father-in-law, Captain William A. McKenzie, a brand-new graduate of Texas A&M University, an Army engineer with Patton's Third Army. One spring day in April 1945, their convoy rolled up to the gates of Buchenwald concentration camp.

There, he bore witness to the Nazi terror, a terror that started with an ideology of hate and superiority based on race and creed.

Bill McKenzie was just a good kid from Texas, put in an incredible position, and that was being one of the first U.S. Army officers to see smoke still coming out of the chimneys, bodies stacked up, and survivors.

In 1994, at the 50th anniversary of freedom in Europe and Paris, Bill McKenzie, that skinny captain from Texas A&M, got to meet a survivor from Buchenwald, Jacques Graubart, who was from Brussels, who had been imprisoned in Buchenwald and survived, and 50 years later, they met face to face in Paris, France.

Mr. McKenzie swaggered up to this man and said, Well, what unit were you in in World War II? And Mr. Gruber said, I wasn't in a unit. I was in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

And Mr. McKenzie was so caught with emotion, so embarrassed for his question, that he said, I never expected to meet a survivor. And Jacques looked at Bill McKenzie and said, I never expected to meet someone who saved us to say thank you.

So today, we are back on this floor to thank the work of Ben Ferencz and so many Americans and other Allies who worked against the ideology of the Nazis, such an affront to American values. And Ben Ferencz was there to put those puzzle pieces together that those American Army officers found at Buchenwald.

Ben Ferencz would travel to that concentration camp. He would collect the evidence of the horrors. He would honor us with the work in that war crimes branch. And Sergeant Ferencz was honorably discharged in 1945 and recruited to work on those trials for many, many years. For three years he led the researchers investigating those records, and we know it was no easy task.

As the lead prosecutor for the Einsatzgruppen case, Ben Ferencz successfully convicted 22 men for taking part in a mobile death squad, which was responsible for nearly a third of Jewish civilian deaths. His work at the Nuremburg trials established an incredible mandate for international criminal responsibility for the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

And Ben Ferencz' work, his sacrifice, echoes true for all of us as we see what Assad has done in Syria, and we see what Putin is doing in Ukraine. Ferencz' career spanned several decades and included fighting for proper compensation for the victims and the survivors of the Holocaust and working to establish an International Criminal Court.

General Leave

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Mr. HILL. Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, let me thank Ms. Frankel for her leadership, Congresswoman Manning for her testimony there, and we all, on both sides of the aisle, stand in recognition of Ben Ferencz' pioneering efforts of his and his colleagues in the Nuremberg trials for laying out the protection of evidence, the careful documentation of it, preserving a way to convict the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Those lessons and Ben Ferencz' legacy live on today, as just a few months ago we received one of our first convictions in a court in Germany of an Assad henchman for murder and mayhem in Syria. There is no doubt in my mind that the chain of evidence and the actions of this Congress, the actions of the United Nations, to promptly set up an evidence protection and evidence documentation effort for Ukraine will bear fruit in coming days. Those are all efforts standing on the shoulders of Ben Ferencz and his colleagues in Nuremburg.

I urge all my colleagues to support this recognition of his efforts.

Mr. Speaker, I urge a ``yes'' vote, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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