Benjamin Ferencz: Last Chief Prosecutor Dies at Nuremberg Trials

The American media reported this on Saturday (local time), citing his son Don Ferencz. The last surviving prosecutor from the trials was 103 years old. “The world has lost a leader in the fight for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes,” the US Holocaust Museum wrote on Twitter.

Ferencz was born in 1920 in what was then Hungarian Transylvania as the son of Orthodox Jews and emigrated to the US with his parents as a child. He grew up in humble circumstances in New York and later studied at the elite Harvard University thanks to a scholarship. The lawyer was not yet 30 years old when he tried Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg.

From November 20, 1945, leading National Socialists, and thus for the first time in history representatives of an unjust regime, had to answer to the court in Nuremberg. The victorious Allied powers try 21 high-ranking war criminals such as Adolf Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring before an international court. The trial ended with twelve death sentences after nearly a year.

Ferencz was chief prosecutor in one of the twelve so-called follow-up trials that followed the trial of the major war criminals from 1946 to 1949. He charged 24 prominent SS men with crimes against humanity and war crimes, among other things. Before the trials, he served as an American soldier in the liberation of several concentration camps. (sda/dpa)