Retirement, Death and Legacy
Frankfurter retired in 1962 after suffering a stroke and was succeeded by Arthur Goldberg. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963.
During World War II Frankfurter was presented with a historic opportunity to pursue a mission in the service of humanity.
In 1943, Jan Karski, an officer in the Polish underground, traveled to Washington as an emissary of the resistance to meet with Franklin Roosevelt and report to the President on the European conflict and specifically conditions in his own country, Poland. Roosevelt requested that Karski meet with Justice Frankfurter, as it would be of vital concern for Frankfurter, himself a Jew, to be apprised of the horrors befalling his fellow Jews in Poland. Frankfurter listened to Karski’s detailed accounts of the program of extermination of the Jewish people carried out by the Nazis. Karski provided his own eyewitness accounts of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and Belzec concentration camp.
Karski’s testimony of this conference with Frankfurter was recorded in an interview for the documentary film produced in 1978, by Claude Lanzmann ("Shoah"), titled "The Karski Report.”
“Karski reproduces, for Lanzmann's camera with a theatrical fervor that embodies the shock he felt upon hearing” Frankfurter render his verdict on the atrocities he had just heard. “I do not believe you.” The oral testimony provided by Karksi addresses the moral challenge presented Frankfurter and the human inability to "conceive the unconceivable and to recognize what Karski calls ' the unprecedented.' "
Felix Frankfurter died from congestive heart failure at the age of 82. His remains are interred in the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
There are two extensive collections of Frankfurter's papers: one at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress and the other at Harvard University. Both are fully open for research and have been distributed to other libraries on microfilm. A chapter of the international youth-led fraternal organization for Jewish teenagers Aleph Zadik Aleph in Scottsdale, AZ is named in his honor.
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