The last living chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, Benjamin Ferencz, is dead. He died on Friday in a care facility in Florida, as US media reported on Saturday (local time), citing his son Don Ferencz. Ferencz was 103 years old. “The world has lost a leader in the fight for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes,” the US Holocaust Museum wrote on Twitter.
Ferencz was born in 1920 in what was then Hungarian Transylvania as the son of orthodox Jews and emigrated to the USA 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 leaders of the German Reich, such as Adolf Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess and Reich Marshal 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. The atonement for the German war crimes became the main theme of his life.
“There were instructions from the Nazis that if a mother is holding a baby, you should shoot through the baby because that way you can kill both of them at once. Those are horror stories, but they’re true and we have to deal with them so that they will not happen again,” Ferencz said in an interview with the German Press Agency in 2020. “I feel like I speak for the victims, for murdered men, women and children. Small children whose heads were smashed on trees.”
What he had to say was particularly important for a German audience, Ferencz emphasized at the time: “I’ve seen that actually decent people can become mass murderers. War can do that. War destroys every form of morality and was nevertheless glorified for centuries. I’ve spent my life inverting that view and making sure that what has always been glorified is seen for the horrific crime that it is.”
The historical role of the lawyer goes beyond the importance of the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Because Ferencz not only inserted the term “genocide” into court practice, he is also considered one of the midwives of the International Criminal Court. In 2009, at the age of almost 90, he symbolically opened the prosecution’s first pleadings in The Hague.
“Ben’s enduring quest for a more peaceful and just world spanned almost eight decades and forever defined the way we respond to mankind’s worst crimes,” said the director of the US Holocaust Museum. “He made history at Nuremberg and continued to do so throughout his extraordinary life.”
In his 2020 biography, Ferencz himself put it this way: “We must protect the right of all people in every single country to live in peace and dignity. That is my goal. If you also have this goal: do whatever you can for it .”
