Ben Ferencz, the last living prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, in which Nazis were prosecuted for their genocidal war crimes and was one of the first outside witnesses to document the atrocities of Nazi labor and concentration camps, has died. He had just turned 103 in March.
Ferencz died Friday night in Boynton Beach, Florida, said St. John’s University law professor John Barrett, who runs a blog on the Nuremberg trials. The death was also confirmed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
“Today the world lost a leader in the search for justice for the victims of genocide and related crimes,” the museum tweeted.
Ferencz, who was born in Transylvania in 1920, came to New York as a child with his immigrant parents fleeing a widespread wave of anti-Semitism. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Ferencz enlisted in the United States Army in time to participate in the invasion of Normandy in World War II.
Due to his legal background, Ferencz became an investigator of Nazi war crimes against US soldiers, as part of a new War Crimes Section of the Office of the Judge Advocate.
When US intelligence reports described soldiers finding large numbers of people near starvation in Nazi camps guarded by SS guards, Ferencz visited first the Ohrdruf labor camp in Germany and then the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp.
In these camps and later in others, Ferencz found corpses “piled up like piles of firewood” and people who were “helpless skeletons with diarrhea, dysentery, typhus, tuberculosis, pneumonia and other diseases, retching on their lice-ridden bunks or in the floor and whose pathetic looks begged for help,” Ferencz wrote in an account of his life.
