Ferencz, a Harvard-educated lawyer, was successful in obtaining convictions for a number of German officers. Who ran roving killing squads throughout the war.
Benjamin Ferencz, the only living prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials that brought Nazi war criminals to justice after WWII. A longtime proponent of international criminal law, died on Friday at the age of 103, according to his son.
Ferencz, a Harvard-educated lawyer, was successful in obtaining convictions for a number of German officers who ran roving killing squads throughout the war. His dying circumstances were not immediately revealed. Ferencz died at an assisted living facility in Boynton Beach, Florida, according to the New York Times.
Nuremberg Trials
He was just 27 years old when he served as a prosecutor in 1947 at Nuremberg. Where 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.
Ferencz then advocated for decades for the creation of an international criminal court. A goal realized with the establishment of an international tribunal that sits in The Hague, Netherlands. Ferencz also was a significant donor to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum established in Washington.
A fighter for justice
“Today, the world lost a leader in the fight for justice for genocide and other crimes against humanity.” Ben Ferencz, the last Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor, has died. “At the age of 27, with no prior trial experience, he obtained guilty verdicts against 22 Nazis,” the US Holocaust Museum wrote on Twitter.
Ferencz was appointed as the United States’ chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials of 22 officers. Who ran mobile paramilitary assassination squads known as Einsatzgruppen. Which were part of the legendary Nazi SS. During the war in German-occupied Europe. The squads carried out mass killings of Jews, gypsies, and others – predominantly civilians – and were responsible for over a million deaths.
“This was the tragic culmination of an intolerant and arrogant programme.” We do not seek vengeance, nor do we desire merely reasonable retribution. We request that this court uphold, by international criminal action. Man’s right to live in peace and dignity, regardless of race or creed. “The case we present is a humanitarian appeal to the law,” Ferencz added.
Ferencz testified in court that the accused officers carried out long-term plans to destroy ethnic, national, political, and religious groups. That were “condemned in the Nazi mind.”
“Genocide – the extermination of entire groups of people – was a key tool of Nazi doctrine,” Ferencz stated.
The accused were all found guilty, and 13 were sentenced to death. It was Ferencz’s first case as a lawyer.
Ferencz was born on March 11, 1920, in Transylvania, Romania. And was 10 months old when his family moved to the United States. Where he grew up destitute in New York City’s “Hell’s Kitchen.” After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1943, he joined the United States military. And served in Europe before joining the newly constituted war crimes department of the United States Army.
He grabbed records and record evidence after the liberation of Nazi death camps. Such as Buchenwald by allied forces, surveying scenes of human misery such as stacks of emaciated corpses. And crematoria where incalculable numbers of lives were burnt.
US prosecution
After the war ended in 1945, Ferencz was recruited to join in the U.S. prosecution at the war crimes trials in Nuremberg. A city where the Nazi leadership had held elaborate propaganda rallies before the war, serving under U.S. General Telford Taylor. 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.”
Worked for holocaust victims
After the Nuremberg trials, Ferencz worked to secure compensation for Holocaust victims and survivors. Ferencz later advocated for the creation of an international criminal court. In 1998, 120 countries adopted a statute in Rome to establish the International Criminal Court, which came into force in 2002.
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.”