The last Nuremberg prosecutor has died

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The last living prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals, Benjamin Ferencz, died at the age of 103. His son Donald Ferencz told AFP news agency on Saturday. The American attorney was a Nazi war crimes investigator after World War II and, at the age of 27, served as the chief prosecutor of the United States military in the so-called Einsatzgruppen trial, one of twelve follow-up trials to the Nuremberg Trials of key Nazi war criminals.

The Nazi task forces were responsible for the murder of more than a million people, mostly Jews. Of the 22 convicted at the trial, four were executed. Ferencz later made a decisive contribution to the establishment of the International Criminal Court.

“Ben’s steadfast quest for a more peaceful and just world spanned nearly eight decades and forever shaped the way we respond to humanity’s worst crimes,” said Sara Bloomfield, director of the Holocaust Museum in Washington.

Swiss ambassador expresses condolences

Swiss UN ambassador Pascale Baeriswyl, 55, tweeted about Ferencz’s death: “Somehow we believed that this kind of mentor and ‘conscience of the world’ would never and should never leave us.” However, his inspiration will remain forever. “Thank you, Ben Ferencz, and rest in peace.”

Ferencz was born in 1920 in a village in what was then Hungarian Transylvania to Jewish parents. A short time later, the family emigrated to the US. Ferencz received his law degree from Harvard University in 1943.

During World War II, he served in the United States Army. He traveled to, among other things, the liberated concentration camps of the Nazis to collect evidence of the atrocities committed there. “I shall never be able to forget the deadly sight of the crematoriums (…) and the emaciated bodies piled up like firewood,” Ferencz wrote in a book published in 1988. (SDA/kes)

Source: Blick