Ben Ferencz, last living Nuremberg prosecutor of Nazis, dies

Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials, has died at the age of 100. Born in Transylvania in 1920, Ferencz immigrated to New York as a young boy with his parents to escape anti-Semitism. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Ferencz joined the US Army, taking part 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 a new War Crimes Section of the Judge Advocate’s Office. After the war and following his short-lived career as a lawyer, Ferencz was recruited to help prosecute Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, which had begun under the leadership of US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson.
At the age of 27, with no previous trial experience, Ferencz became chief prosecutor for a 1947 case in which 22 former commanders were charged with murdering over one million Jews, Romani and other enemies of the Third Reich in Eastern Europe. Rather than depending on witnesses, Ferencz mostly relied on official German documents to make his case. All the defendants were convicted, and more than a dozen were sentenced to death by hanging even though Ferencz hadn’t asked for the death penalty.
After the war crimes trials, Ferencz went to work for a consortium of Jewish charitable groups to help Holocaust survivors regain properties, homes, businesses, artwork, 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. In later decades, Ferencz championed the creation of an international court which could prosecute any government’s leaders for war crimes. Those dreams were realised in 2002 with establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, though its effectiveness has been limited by the failure of countries like the United States to participate.
Ferencz’s work in prosecuting Nazi war criminals made him a leading figure in the human rights movement, a position he used to advocate for the creation of an international court to handle war crimes trials. He argued that if individuals, regardless of their rank or status, were held accountable for war crimes, this could diminish the likelihood of atrocities being committed in the future. Although progress towards international accountability for war crimes has been slow and uneven, Ferencz’s lifelong devotion to the ideal that the guilty must be held to account helped to establish a framework for seeking justice for victims of war crimes today. His death is seen as the end of an era and a reminder of the importance of continuing to fight for justice for all those affected by war.



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