Final surviving Nuremberg prosecutor dies aged 103, convicted 22 Nazis (2023)

Ben Ferencz, the last living prosecutor who tried Nazis for genocidal war crimesduring theNuremberg trialsand was among the first outside witnesses to document the atrocities of concentration camps, has died.

He had just turned 103 in March.

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

'Today the world lost a leader in the quest for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes,' the museum tweeted.

Born in Transylvania,Romania, in 1920, Ferencz immigrated as a 10-month-old with his parents to New York to escape rampant antisemitism.

He grew up poor in 'Hell's Kitchen.' After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1943, he joined the U.S. military and fought in Europe just in time to take part in the Normandy invasion before joining the U.S. Army's newly formed war crimes section.

Using his legal background, he became an investigator of Nazi war crimes against U.S. soldiers as part of a new War Crimes Section of the Judge Advocate's Office.

When U.S. intelligence reports described soldiers encountering large groups of starving people in Nazi camps watched over by SS guards, Ferencz followed up with visits, first at the Ohrdruf labor camp in Germany and then at the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp.

At those camps and later others, he found bodies 'piled up like cordwood' and 'helpless skeletons with diarrhea, dysentery, typhus, TB, pneumonia, and other ailments, retching in their louse ridden bunks or on the ground with only their pathetic eyes pleading for help,' Ferencz wrote inan account of his life.

'The Buchenwald concentration camp was a charnel house of indescribable horrors,' Ferencz wrote. 'There is no doubt that I was indelibly traumatized by my experiences as a war crimes investigator of Nazi extermination centers. 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 came back empty-handed.

After the war, Ferencz was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army and returned to New York to begin practicing law. But that was short-lived.

Because of his experiences as a war crimes investigator, he was recruited to help prosecute Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, which had begun under the leadership of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson.

Before leaving for Germany, he married his childhood sweetheart, Gertrude.

At the age of 27, with no previous trial experience, Ferencz became chief prosecutor for a 1947 case in which 22 former commanderswho led mobile paramilitary killing squads known as Einsatzgruppen that were part of the notorious Nazi SS.

The squads carried out mass killings targeting Jews, gypsies and others - primarily civilians - during the war in German-occupied Europe and were responsible for more than a million deaths including Jews, Romani and other enemies of the Third Reich in Eastern Europe.

Ferencz was in charge of overseeing the investigators examining documents in the German Foreign Ministry.

It was then when one of his researchers discovered top-secret reports from Einsatzgruppen, detailing the towns and cities that the killing squads passed through and the horrors they visited upon them.

One was marked up as a dispath from Kyiv.

'The city's Jews were ordered to present themselves. About thirty-four thousand reported, including women and children. After they had been made to give up their clothing and valuables, all of them were killed, which took several days,' the document read.

Speaking to the Guardian, Ferencz recalled how defendant had ordered his troops: 'If the mother is holding an infant to her breast, don't shoot the mother, shoot the infant because the bullet will go through both of them, and you'll save ammunition.'

Nazi defendants including Hermann Göring faced a series of trials for crimes against humanity including the genocide known as the Holocaust in which six million Jewish people and millions of others were systematically killed.

Rather than depending on witnesses, Ferencz mostly relied on official German documents to make his case.

He seized documents and record evidence at Nazi death camps such as Buchenwald after their liberation by allied forces, surveying scenes of human misery including piles of emaciated corpses and the crematoria where untold numbers of bodies were incinerated.

'It is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenseless men, women, and children,' Ferencz said in his opening statement at the trial.

'This was the tragic fulfillment of a program of intolerance and arrogance. Vengeance is not our goal, nor do we seek merely a just retribution. We ask this court to affirm by international penal action man's right to live in peace and dignity regardless of his race or creed. The case we present is a plea of humanity to law,' Ferencz added.

Ferencz told the court that the accused officers methodically carried out long-range plans to exterminate ethnic, national, political and religious groups 'condemned in the Nazi mind.'

'Genocide - the extermination of whole categories of human beings - was a foremost instrument of the Nazi doctrine,' Ferencz said.

All the defendants were convicted, and 13 were sentenced to death by hanging even though Ferencz hadn't asked for the death penalty.

It was Ferencz's first career case.

'At the beginning of April 1948, when the long legal judgment was read, I felt vindicated,' he wrote. 'Our pleas to protect humanity by the rule of law had been upheld.'

With the war crimes trials winding down, Ferencz went to work for a consortium of Jewish charitable groups to help Holocaust survivors regain properties, homes, businesses, art works, Torah scrolls, and other Jewish religious items that had been confiscated from them by the Nazis.

He also later assisted in negotiations that would lead to compensation to the Nazi victims.

The trials were controversial at the time but ended up being hailed as a milestone on the path toward establishing international law and holding war criminals accountable in even-handed trials.

'What was most significant about it was it gave us and it gave me an insight into the mentality of mass murderers,' Ferencz said in a 2018 interview with the American Bar Association.

'They had murdered over a million people, including hundreds of thousands of children in cold blood, and I wanted to understand how it is that educated people - many of them had PhDs or they were generals in the German Army - could not only tolerate but lead and commit such horrible crimes.'

After the Nuremberg trials, Ferencz worked to secure compensation for Holocaust victims and survivors.

In later decades, Ferencz championed the creation of an international court which could prosecute any government's leaders for war crimes, a goal realized with the establishment of an international tribunal that sits in The Hague, Netherlands.

In 1998, 120 countries adopted a statute in Rome to establish the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which came into force in 2002, though its effectiveness has been limited by the failure of countries like the United States to participate.

At age 91, he took part in the first case before the court by delivering a closing statement in the prosecution of accused Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, who was convicted of war crimes.

Over the years, Ferencz was critical of actions by his own country including during the Vietnam War. In January 2020, he wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times calling the U.S. killing of a senior Iranian military leader in a drone strike an 'immoral action' and 'a clear violation of national and international law.'

'The reason I have continued to devote most of my life to preventing war is my awareness that the next war will make the last one look like child's play,' he told the bar association in 2018. '... 'Law, not war' remains my slogan and my hope.'

Ferencz was also a significant donor to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum established in Washington.

'Today the world lost a leader in the quest for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes. We mourn the death of Ben Ferencz-the last Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor. At age 27, with no prior trial experience, he secured guilty verdicts against 22 Nazis,' the U.S. Holocaust Museum said in a post on Twitter.

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