Ben Ferencz, the last prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials has died

Benjamin Berell Ferencz, better known as Ben Ferencz, the last prosecutor left alive from the Nuremberg Trials and who tried Nazi officials for crimes against humanity and genocide, died in Florida at the age of 103, the United States Holocaust Museum confirmed Sunday.

“Today the world has lost a leader in the pursuit of justice for victims of genocide and related crimes. We mourn the death of Ben Ferencz, Nuremberg’s last war crimes prosecutor,” the museum wrote on its social media.

The memorial museum, created to “inspire citizens and leaders around the world to confront hatred, prevent genocide and promote human dignity,” Ferencz noted, at the age of 27 and with no previous trial experience, obtained guilty verdicts against 22 Nazis.

Ferencz died on Friday in Boynton Beach, a coastal Florida city located in Palm Beach County.

Born March 11, 1920 in Transylvania, Romania, Ferencz arrived in the United States at the hands of his parents 10 months after his birth.

“He grew up in New York’s Hell Kitchen neighborhood. He knew poverty, rampant crime, and suffering. He quickly became a public school student, graduate, Harvard Law School graduate, and WWII United States Army infantryman, ‘ Professor John Q. Barrett, of St. John’s University, who was his student, recalled on his blog.

After Ferencz graduated from Harvard in 1943joined an anti-aircraft artillery battalion preparing for the invasion of France.

As a soldier he fought in major campaigns in Europe. When Nazi atrocities were uncovered, he was transferred to a newly created war crimes branch of the military to gather evidence of Nazi brutality and arrest the criminals, the benferencz.org website details.

In his book “PlanetHood: The Key to Your Future” (1988), written to promote a comprehensive system of international law and tribunals, Ferencz describes the scenes he witnessed as he liberated “these centers of death and destruction”:

“Fields like Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Dachau are vividly engraved in my mind.. Even today, when I close my eyes, I witness a deadly sight I will never forget: the crematoria glow with the fires of burnt flesh, the mounds of emaciated corpses piled up like firewood waiting to be burned… I had glimpsed the hell.” narrated.

Beginning in the spring of 1946, Ferencz served as a prosecutor in Nuremberg.in the US occupation zone of what had been Nazi Germany.

Between 1947 and 1948, Barrett details, Ferencz was the lead prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen caseon the prosecution of members of Nazi Germany’s roving execution squads.

“It was his first case as a lawyer.. He accused those responsible for the Nazi extermination operations in Eastern Europe, of crimes against humanity (…), war crimes and membership in Nazi criminal organizations,” recalled his student of him.

More than twenty Einsatzgruppen defendants were convicted of killing nearly a million people. “The Einsatzgruppen case was and is the largest murder trial in human history,” Barrett said.

“Nuremberg taught me that creating a world of tolerance and compassion would be a long and arduous task. And I also learned that If we are not dedicated to developing effective world laws, the same cruel mentality that made the Holocaust possible could one day destroy the entire human race.Ferencz said he is interested in setting up an international tribunal to try any government for war crimes.

Generally unobtrusive in the media, in one of his last public appearances, in an interview with CBS in May, he held that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “a war criminal” and that Russia should be judged by international justice for its his “aggression”. against Ukraine.