Last living Nazi prosecutor Ben Ferencz dies at 103 | World News

Ben Ferencz, the last living prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials who tried Nazis for genocidal war crimes and was one of the first outside witnesses to document Nazi labor and concentration camp atrocities, has died. He just turned 103 in March.

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Ferencz died Friday night in Boynton Beach, Fla., according to John Barrett, a St. John’s University law professor who ran a blog about the Nuremberg trials. The United States Holocaust Museum in Washington also confirmed his death.

“Today, the world lost a leader who brought justice to the victims of genocide and related crimes,” the museum tweeted.

Born in Transylvania in 1920, Ferencz immigrated to New York with his parents at a young age to escape rampant anti-Semitism. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Ferencz enlisted in the U.S. Army in time for the D-Day landings during World War II. Drawing on his legal background, he became an investigator investigating Nazi war crimes against American soldiers as part of the new War Crimes Section of the prosecutor’s office.

When U.S. intelligence reports described soldiers encountering large groups of starving people at Nazi camps guarded by the SS, Ferencz made subsequent visits, first at the Aldruf labor camp in Germany and then at the notorious Burgundy camp. Chenwald concentration camp.In those camps, and later others, he found corpses “heaped like pine logs” and “helpless skeletons suffering from diarrhea, dysentery, typhus, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and other diseases, retching on lice-infested bunks or on the ground , only their poor eyes begging for help,” Ferencz wrote account of his life.

“Buchenwald was a morgue of indescribable horror,” Ferencz wrote. “There is no doubt that my experience as a war crimes investigator at the Nazi extermination center left an indelible impression on me.” trauma. I still try not to talk or think about the details.”

At one point near the end of the war, Ferencz was sent to Adolf Hitler’s mountain resort in the Bavarian Alps in search of incriminating documents, but he returned empty-handed.

After the war, Ferencz was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army and returned to New York to practice law. But that was short lived. Because of his experience as a war crimes investigator, he was recruited to help prosecute Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials, which began under U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Before heading to Germany, he married his childhood sweetheart Gertrude.

At 27, Ferencz, with no trial experience, became chief prosecutor in a 1947 case in which 22 former commanders were charged with murdering more than a million Jews, Roma and Third Reich soldiers in Eastern Europe. other enemies. Instead of relying on witnesses, Ferencz relied primarily on official German documents to prove his case. All defendants were convicted, and a dozen were sentenced to hang, although Ferencz did not demand the death penalty.

“I felt vindicated when the lengthy legal judgment was read in early April 1948,” he wrote. “Our plea to protect humanity through the rule of law has been upheld.”

With his war crimes trial over, Ferencz began working for a coalition of Jewish charities helping Holocaust survivors regain property, homes, businesses, artwork, Torah scrolls and other Jewish religious objects confiscated by the Nazis. He later Also assisted in negotiations leading to compensation for Nazi victims.

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In later decades, Ferencz supported the creation of an international tribunal that could prosecute any government leader for war crimes. With the creation of the International Criminal Court in The Hague in 2002, these dreams were realized, although its effectiveness was limited by the failure of countries such as the United States to participate.

Ferencz is survived by a son and three daughters. His wife passed away in 2019.