Last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin B Ferencz dies at age 103

Benjamin B Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials, who convicted Nazi war criminals of organising mass murder and German industrialists of using slave labour from concentration camps to build Adolf Hitler’s war machine, died on Friday at an assisted living facility in Boynton Beach, Florida. He was 103.

His son, Don, confirmed the death.

A Harvard-educated New York lawyer whose concept of evil was formed when he was a Jewish soldier in Europe and a war-crimes investigator at Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Dachau, Ferencz campaigned after the second World War for restitution of property seized by the Nazis. For much of his life he crusaded for an international criminal court, and for laws to end wars of aggression.

The author of nine books and scores of articles, he was fluent in French, Spanish, German, Hungarian and Yiddish and spoke at world peace conferences. He was widely quoted in interviews and wrote countless letters to editors.

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His dream of a tribunal to prosecute war crimes was partly realised in 2002 with the establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. But its effectiveness has been limited, and many nations, including the United States, do not recognize its authority.

Born to illiterate parents in Transylvania, raised in the Hell’s Kitchen area of Manhattan in New York City and plucked from obscurity as an army corporal because he had researched war crimes for a professor, Mr Ferencz was sent to newly liberated concentration camps by Gen George S. Patton in the closing stages of the war and rose to prominence as the youngest prosecutor at the postwar Nuremberg trials.

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Fulfilling an Allied pledge to bring war criminals to justice, 13 trials were held in Nuremberg, Germany, where Nazi rallies had celebrated Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s. In the first and most important trial, held in 1945 and 1946, the International Military Tribunal convicted 24 of the Third Reich’s senior leaders, including Hermann Göring, Hitler’s designated successor, who committed suicide on the eve of his execution, and military commander Wilhelm Keitel, who was hanged. The chief prosecutor was Associate Justice Robert H Jackson of the US Supreme Court.

A dozen subsequent trials at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg put German judges, doctors, industrialists, diplomats and less senior military leaders in the dock in cases supervised by Mr Jackson’s successor, Gen Telford Taylor. Mr Ferencz was assigned to prosecute the notorious Einsatzgruppen case, which for its staggering volume of victims has been called the biggest murder trial in history.

It was the case against 22 Nazis, including six generals, who organised, directed and often joined roaming SS extermination squads – 3,000 killers, aided by local police forces and other authorities, who rounded up and slaughtered 1 million specifically targeted people, or groups, in Nazi-occupied lands. These included the intelligentsia of every nation, political and cultural leaders, members of the nobility, clergy, teachers, Jews, Gypsies and other “undesirables”. Most were shot, others gassed in mobile vans.

They were crimes that beggar the imagination – 33,771 men, women and children were shot or buried alive in a ravine near Kyiv, Ukraine, called Babi Yar; the two-day liquidation of 25,000 Latvian Jews from Riga’s ghetto, forced to lie down in pits and shot; the spectacle of a barbarian in Lithuania who killed Jews with a crowbar while crowds cheered and marches and anthems were played on an accordion.

I learned that if we did not devote ourselves to developing effective world law, the same cruel mentality that made the Holocaust possible might one day destroy the entire human race

—  Benjamin B Ferencz

Unfolding in 1947 and 1948, the Einsatzgruppen trial was Mr Ferencz’s first court case. But the evidence – mostly detailed records of killings kept by the Nazis themselves – was overwhelming and irrefutable.

“In this case, the defendants are not charged with sitting in an office hundreds of miles away from the slaughter,” the court said in a unanimous judgment. “These men were in the field actively superintending, controlling, directing and taking an active part in the bloody harvest.”

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All the defendants were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Fourteen were sentenced to death and two to life in prison. Only four executions were ultimately carried out, however, which was typical of the Nuremberg trials: convictions, heavy sentences and later commutations. Analysts said leniency arose because the new realities of the Cold War with the Soviet Union meant the western powers needed Germany politically.

After the Nuremberg trials ended, in 1949, Mr Ferencz remained in West Germany and helped Jewish groups negotiate a reparations settlement in 1952 under which West Germany agreed to pay $822 million to Israel and to groups representing survivors of Nazi persecution as what Mr Ferencz and other critics called token compensation for suffering and for assets seized illegally. Only $125 million of the compensation went to victims.

In 1956, he returned to New York and became Gen Taylor’s law partner. But in the late 1960s and early ’70s, as the United States became more deeply involved in the Vietnam War, Mr Ferencz gradually withdrew from private law practice to write books and to promote world peace and a permanent international criminal court.

“Nuremberg taught me that creating a world of tolerance and compassion would be a long and arduous task,” he recalled on his website. “And I also learned that if we did not devote ourselves to developing effective world law, the same cruel mentality that made the Holocaust possible might one day destroy the entire human race.”

Benjamin Berell Ferencz was born in a thatched house in the Transylvanian village of Somcuta Mare, Romania, on March 11th, 1920, to Joseph and Sarah Legman (Schwartz) Ferencz. In the shifting borders of the era, his sister had been born a Hungarian in the same house a year and a half earlier. When Mr Ferencz was an infant, the family fled to the United States to escape a pogrom of Jews after Transylvania was ceded by Hungary to Romania under the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.

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“We came here as poor immigrants,” Mr Ferencz told The New York Times in 2000. “My parents were illiterate. No skills, no nothing, except two little children. I was raised in New York, Hell’s Kitchen, a high-density crime area. I recognised early that I wanted to do crime prevention. I was interested in juvenile delinquency primarily because I was surrounded by juvenile delinquents.”

He attended Townsend Harris High School in Manhattan, but he got into a spat with a dean over his refusal to attend gym classes and did not receive a diploma. He graduated with high honours from the tuition-free City College in 1940 and received a scholarship to Harvard Law School, where he studied under renowned legal scholar Roscoe Pound. His research for Sheldon Glueck, a Harvard professor who was writing a book on war crimes, took him deep into the subject and proved critical to his career in Europe.

After earning his law degree in 1943, he enlisted in the wartime army and became a private in an anti-aircraft artillery unit. He joined the Normandy invasion in 1944 and fought across France and Germany. In 1945, his legal training and war-crimes expertise were recognised by the army, and he was assigned to Patton’s 3rd Army headquarters and then to investigate newly liberated concentration camps for evidence of war crimes.

In 1946, he married Gertrude Fried in New York. The couple soon returned to Germany, and their four children were all born in Nuremberg. His wife died in 2019. In addition to his son, he is survived by three daughters, Nina Dale, Robin Ferencz-Kotfica and Keri Ferencz, and three grandchildren. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.