Ben Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials who tried the Nazis for genocidal war crimes and was one in every of the first outside witnesses to document the atrocities of the Nazi labor and concentration camps, has died. He just turned 103 in March.
Ferencz died Friday night in Boynton Beach, Florida, based on a St. John’s University, John Barrett, who leads blog about the Nuremberg trials.
The death was also confirmed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
“Today the world has lost a frontrunner in the quest for justice for the victims of genocide and related crimes,” the museum wrote on Twitter.
Born in Transylvania in 1920, Ferencz emigrated together with his parents to Recent York as a really young boy to flee rampant anti-Semitism.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Ferencz joined the U.S. Army in time to participate in the invasion of Normandy during World War II.
Using his legal background, he became an investigator for Nazi war crimes against American soldiers under the latest War Crimes Section of the Judge’s Attorney’s Office.
When US intelligence reports described soldiers encountering large groups of ravenous people in Nazi camps guarded by SS guards, Ferencz continued his visits, first to the Ohrdruf labor camp in Germany after which to the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp.
In those camps, and later in others, he found bodies “piled up like wood” and “helpless skeletons with diarrhoea, dysentery, typhus, tuberculosis, pneumonia and other ailments, vomiting in lice-infested bunks or lying on the ground with pitiful eyes begging for help.” Ferencz wrote report of his life.
“The Buchenwald concentration camp was a mortuary of indescribable horrors,” Ferencz wrote. “There isn’t a doubt that my experiences as a war crimes investigator in Nazi killing centers left an enduring mark on my trauma. I still try not to speak or take into consideration the details.”
In some unspecified time in the future towards the end of the war, Ferencz was sent to Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps to go looking for incriminating documents, but returned empty-handed.
After the war, Ferencz was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army and returned to Recent York to start practicing law.
However it was short-lived. On account of his experience as a war crimes investigator, he was recruited to assist prosecute Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg Trials, which began under the presidency 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 prior trial experience, Ferencz became the chief prosecutor in a 1947 case during which 22 former commanders were accused of murdering over one million Jews, Roma and other enemies of the Third Reich in Eastern Europe.
As an alternative of counting on witnesses, Ferencz relied mainly on official German documents to make his case.
All the accused were convicted, and a dozen were sentenced to death by hanging, although Ferencz had not asked for the death penalty.
“In early April 1948, when the long court sentence was read out, I felt justified,” he wrote. “Our appeals for the rule of law to guard humanity have been heeded.”
After the war crimes trials ended, Ferencz began working for a consortium of Jewish charitable groups to assist Holocaust survivors recuperate properties, homes, businesses, artwork, Torah scrolls, and other Jewish religious items that had been confiscated from them by the Nazis.
Later, he also helped in negotiations that were to guide to compensation for the victims of Nazism.
In later a long time, Ferencz advocated the creation of a global court that would prosecute the leaders of every government for war crimes.
These dreams got here true in 2002 with the creation of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, although its effectiveness was hampered by the lack of participation of nations corresponding to the United States.
Ferencz left a son and three daughters. His wife died in 2019.