Ben Ferencz, last living Nuremberg prosecutor of Nazi war crimes, dead at 103

Warning: This article contains graphic references to the Holocaust.

Ben Ferencz, the last prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials that prosecuted the Nazis for genocidal war crimes, has died at the age of 103.

Ferencz was one of the first outside witnesses to document the brutality of Nazi workers and concentration camps. He died in the evening in Boynton Beach, Fla., according to John Barrett, a law professor at the University of St.

The death was also confirmed by the US Holocaust Museum in Washington.

“Today, the world loses a leader in the pursuit of justice for the victims of genocide and related crimes,” the museum tweeted.

Born in Transylvania in 1920, Ferencz moved to New York as a teenager with his parents to escape anti-Semitism. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Ferencz joined the US army in time to participate in the invasion of Normandy during World War II. Using his legal background, he became an investigator ​​​​of Nazi war crimes against US soldiers as part of the War Crimes Section of the Office of the Judge Advocate General.

When US intelligence reports described soldiers encountering large groups of starving men in Nazi camps guarded by SS guards, Ferencz followed up with visits, first to the Ohrdruf labor camp in Germany and then to the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp. In these and later camps, he found corpses “piled up like cordwood” and “helpless skeletons with diarrhea, dysentery, typhus, TB, pneumonia, and other diseases, vomiting on flea beds ridden with fleas or on the ground with sad eyes. asking for help,” Ferencz wrote in his life account.

“The Buchenwald concentration camp was an indescribable charnel house,” wrote Ferencz. “There is no doubt that I was deeply traumatized by my experience as a war crimes investigator in a Nazi extermination center. I still try not to talk or think about the details.”

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

After the war, Ferencz was discharged from the US army and returned to New York to start a law practice. But life is short. Because of his experience as a ​war crimes investigator, he was hired to prosecute Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, which began under the leadership of US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Before leaving for Germany, he married his childhood sweetheart, Gertrude.

At 27, without previous trial experience, Ferencz became the chief prosecutor for the 1947 case in which 22 former commanders were accused of killing over a million Jews, Roma and enemies of the Third Reich in Eastern Europe. Instead of relying on witnesses, Ferencz mostly relied on official German documents to make his case. All the accused were convicted, and more than a dozen were sentenced to death by hanging although Ferencz did not seek the death penalty.

“In early April 1948, when the long legal verdict was read, I thought it was right,” he wrote. “Our demand to protect humanity under the rule of law has been upheld.”

With the war crimes trials over, Ferencz worked for a consortium of Jewish charity groups to help Holocaust survivors recover property, homes, businesses, artwork, Torah scrolls and other Jewish religious items confiscated by the Nazis. He also later assisted in the negotiations that would provide reparations for the victims of the Nazis.

In the following decade, Ferencz championed the creation of an international court that could prosecute any government leader for war crimes. That dream was realized in 2002 with the establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, although its effectiveness was limited by the failure of countries like the United States to participate.

Ferencz is survived by a son and three daughters. Her husband died in 2019.