Benjamin Ferencz, last surviving prosecutor at Nuremberg trials, dead at 103

BOYNTON BEACH, Fla. — Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials in the late 1940s, died on Friday. He was 103.

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Ferencz died at an assisted living facility in Boynton Beach, Florida, his son, Don, told The New York Times. His death also was confirmed by the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington.

“Today the world lost a leader in the quest for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes,” the museum tweeted.

Ferencz secured 22 convictions against Nazi officials including six generals, who organized, directed and at times joined SS extermination squads during World War II, the Times reported. The units, called Einsatzgruppen, operated in Eastern Europe during World War II, according to The Washington Post.

The extermination squads killed more than 1 million people in Nazi-occupied territories, including political and cultural leaders, intelligentsia, clergy members, teachers, Jews, Gypsies and members of the nobility, the Times reported.

Some of the crimes included 33,771 men, women and children shot or buried alive in the ravine near Kyiv; the two-day slaughter of 25,000 Jews from a ghetto in Riga, Latvia; and an official in Lithuania who killed Jews with a crowbar while crowds cheered and an accordion played music, according to the newspaper.

All 22 defendants were convicted and four were executed, the Post reported.

He was “the lawyer for humanity,” John Q. Barrett, a professor of law at St. John’s University in New York City and a scholar of the Nuremberg trials, told the newspaper. “The scale of the atrocities, the pure innocence of the victims … was at the heart of the exterminationist evil of Nazism.”

Ferencz was 27 when he prosecuted the cases beginning in 1947. He played a key role in securing compensation for Holocaust survivors and was instrumental in creating the International Criminal Court at The Hague, NBC News reported.

“I was damn lucky to live this long,” Ferencz told the news outlet in November 2022, in what was his last media interview. “I hope that I’ve done some good during that lifetime.”

He turned 103 on March 11.

Ferencz published a book “Less Than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation,” in 1979. The book detailed the cases Ferencz worked as a special counsel in prosecuting German industrialists who offered only token compensation to postwar victims of the Holocaust, according to the Times.

“The corporate directors were surprised and indignant to find themselves in the criminal dock,” Ferencz wrote. “As far as they were concerned, the use of slaves was a patriotic duty which was both normal and proper under the circumstances.”

The court found 11 defendants guilty in 1948 and sentenced them to prison terms of three to 12 years, the Times reported.

Ferencz visited Nazi concentration camps after the war, including Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Dachau, according to the Post.

“Even today, when I close my eyes, I witness a deadly vision I can never forget -- the crematoria aglow with the fire of burning flesh, the mounds of emaciated corpses stacked like cordwood waiting to be burned,” Ferencz once said. “I had peered into hell.”