The only living prosecutor from the post-World War II Nuremberg trials has died at the age of 103.
Ben Ferencz was only 27 years old when he achieved the convictions of 22 Nazi officers for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
He eventually lobbied for the establishment of an international court to prosecute war crimes, which was accomplished in 2002.
Ferencz died quietly in his sleep on Friday evening at an assisted living home in Boynton Beach, Florida.
The US Holocaust Museum confirmed his death, stating that the world has lost “a leader in the battle for justice for genocide victims.”
Ferencz was born in Transylvania, Romania, in 1920, but his family immigrated to the United States when he was a child to avoid antisemitism, eventually settling in New York.
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1943, he joined the US Army and participated in the Allied invasions in Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. He advanced to the rank of Sergeant and eventually joined a squad entrusted with researching and accumulating evidence of Nazi war crimes.
The squad was based with the army in Germany and would explore concentration camps as they were liberated, collecting notes on conditions and interviewing survivors.
In a later account of his life, Ferencz described finding bodies “piled up like cordwood” and “helpless skeletons with diarrhoea, dysentery, typhus, TB, pneumonia, and other maladies, retching in their louse-ridden bunks or on the ground with just their mournful eyes crying for help.”
He characterized Buchenwald, one of the largest camps inside Germany, as a “charnel house of unfathomable horrors.” “There is no doubt that my experiences as a war crimes investigator of Nazi extermination centres were profoundly traumatizing,” he said. “I’m still trying not to talk about or think about the details.”
Nuremberg 75 Years Later
After the war, he returned to New York to practice law, but was quickly recruited to assist in the prosecution of Nazis at the Nuremberg trials, despite having no prior trial experience.
He was appointed chief prosecutor in the trial of members of the Einsatzgruppen, mobile SS killing squads that operated across Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe and are estimated to have murdered over a million people.
All 22 individuals on trial were convicted, with 13 receiving death sentences and four being executed.
Ferencz, who spoke six languages, including German, remained in West Germany after the trials concluded and assisted Jewish groups in obtaining a reparations settlement from the new government.
In his latter years, he became a professor of international law and fought for an international court that could punish the leaders of states found to have perpetrated war crimes, penning multiple books on the subject.
The International Criminal Court was established in 2002 at The Hague, Netherlands, but its usefulness has been hindered by the refusal of some important countries, including the United States, to participate.
Ferencz is survived by a son and three daughters. Gertrude Fried, his childhood sweetheart, passed away in 2019.
