The last living prosecutor of the Nazis, Ben Ferencz, died in 103 | World news

Ben Ferencz, the last remaining prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, who tried the Nazis for genocidal crimes and was among the first outside witnesses to document the atrocities of the Nazi occupation and concentration camps, has died. He just turned 103 in March.

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Ferencz died Friday evening in Boynton Beach, Florida, according to St. John’s University law professor John Barrett, who runs a blog about the Nuremberg trials. The death was also confirmed by the US Holocaust Museum in Washington.

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

Born in Transylvania in 1920, Ferencz immigrated as a very young boy with his parents to New York to escape rampant anti-Semitism. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Ferencz joined the US Army in time to participate in the Normandy invasion during World War II. Using his legal background, he became an investigator of Nazi war crimes against US soldiers as part of the new War Crimes Section of the Office of the Attorney General.

When US intelligence reports described soldiers encountering large groups of starving people in Nazi camps overseen by SS guards, Ferencz followed up with visits, first at the Ohrdruf labor camp in Germany and then at the famous the famous Buchenwald concentration camp. In those camps and others later, he saw corpses “stacked up like ropes” and “unsalvageable skeletons with diarrhea, ulcers, typhus, TB, pneumonia, and other diseases.” , coming up in their long toilets or on the floor with only their pitiful eyes. begging for help,” Ferencz wrote in an account of his life.

Ferencz wrote: “The Buchenwald concentration camp was a charnel house of unexplained horrors. “There is no doubt that my experiences as a war crime investigator of the Nazi extermination factories completely scarred me. I also tried to don’t talk or think about the details.”

Towards 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 honorably discharged from the US Army and returned to New York to begin practicing. But that was temporary. Because of his experiences as a war crime investigator, he was hired to help prosecute Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, which began under the direction of United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Before moving to Germany, he married his childhood sweetheart, Gertrude.

At the age of 27, with no previous trial experience, Ferencz became the chief prosecutor for the 1947 trial in which 22 former authorities were accused of killing 1 million Jews, Gypsies and other enemies of the Third Reich in Eastern Europe. Rather than relying on witnesses, Ferencz mostly relied on German documents to make his case. All the defendants were found guilty, and more than a dozen were sentenced to death by hanging even though Ferencz had not asked for the death penalty.

He wrote: “In early April 1948, when the long sentence was read out according to the law, I felt vindicated. “Our pleas to protect humanity through the rule of law have been upheld.”

With war crimes trials winding down, Ferencz went to work for a group of Jewish charities to help Holocaust survivors recover property, homes, businesses, works of art, books- reading the Torah, and other Jewish religious items that the Nazis had taken from them. . He also later helped in negotiations that would lead to reparations for Nazi victims.

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In the past decades, Ferencz promoted the creation of an international court which could try any government leaders for war crimes. Those dreams were realized in 2002 with the establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, although its effectiveness has been limited by the failure of countries such as the United States to participate.

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