Chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials: Benjamin Ferencz died at the age of 103

The last living prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials against Nazi war criminals, Benjamin Ferencz, has died at the age of 103. He later made a decisive contribution to the establishment of the International Criminal Court.

The chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, Benjamin Ferencz, is dead. He died at the age of 103 in a care facility in Florida, as reported by US media, citing his son Don Ferencz. He was the last living prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.

The US lawyer was a Nazi war crimes investigator after World War II and, at the age of 27, served as the US Army’s chief prosecutor in the so-called Einsatzgruppen Trial, one of the twelve follow-up trials to the Nuremberg trials of major Nazi war criminals. The Nazi task forces were responsible for the murder of more than a million people, mostly Jews. Of the 22 convicted in 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 almost eight decades and forever shaped the way we respond to mankind’s worst crimes,” said Sara Bloomfield, director of the Holocaust Museum in Washington.

Chief prosecutor at age 27

Born the son of orthodox Jews, he emigrated to the United States with his parents as a child. He grew up in modest circumstances in New York and later studied at the elite Harvard University thanks to a scholarship. The lawyer was not even 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 in court in Nuremberg. The victorious Allied powers tried 21 high-ranking war criminals such as Adolf Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring before an international court. The trial ended after almost a year with twelve death sentences.

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 accused 24 leading SS men of crimes against humanity and war crimes, among other things.

Before the trials, he served as a US soldier in the liberation of several concentration camps. “I shall never be able to forget the deadly sight of the crematoria (…) and the emaciated bodies piled up like firewood,” Ferencz wrote in a book published in 1988.