Robert William Ferris (*1921)
“I’m only here for the sake of justice.”[1]
Robert William Ferris was born in Stratford, England, on February 2, 1921. In May 1940, he joined the British Army and was assigned to the Royal Engineers. On June 21, 1942, Ferris was taken prisoner in North Africa, in the second battle for Tobruk. He was sent to Italy as a prisoner of war. After Italy’s change of sides in 1943, the German Wehrmacht took the POWs interned in Italy to Germany, in most cases to Silesia. In September 1943, Robert Ferris was taken in a cattle car to Auschwitz, where he was interned in the E715 prisoner of war camp with 200 other British POWs. Until January 1945, he had to work at the I.G. Farben construction site, where he witnessed the treatment of the concentration camp prisoners by the Farben employees and the SS.
On January 21, 1945, the Wehrmacht forced the British POWs to march from Auschwitz through Czechoslovakia all the way to Nuremberg, where Ferris was liberated. In 1946, Robert Ferris was discharged from the British Army, and he returned to London and worked as a plumber. In London, on July 1, 1947, Ferris made a formal sworn statement for the prosecution in the I.G. Farben Trial at Nuremberg, and he was examined as a witness in Nuremberg on November 14, 1947. On February 19, 1953, Robert Ferris appeared as a witness in the Wollheim suit against I.G. Farben in Frankfurt am Main.
Ferris’s present whereabouts are unknown to the editors. We are grateful for any information provided.
(MN; transl. KL)