Ben Ferencz, the final residing prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, who tried Nazis for genocidal warfare crimes and was among the many first exterior witnesses to doc the atrocities of Nazi labor and focus camps, has died. He had simply turned 103 in March.
Ferencz died Friday night in Boynton Beach, Florida, in accordance with St. John’s University regulation professor John Barrett, who runs a weblog in regards to the Nuremberg trials. The demise additionally 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.
Born in Transylvania in 1920, Ferencz immigrated as a really younger boy along with his dad and mom to New York to flee rampant antisemitism. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Ferencz joined the U.S. Army in time to participate within the Normandy invasion throughout World War II. Using his authorized background, he turned an investigator of Nazi warfare crimes towards U.S. troopers as a part of a brand new War Crimes Section of the Judge Advocate’s Office.
When U.S. intelligence reviews described troopers encountering giant teams of ravenous individuals in Nazi camps watched over by SS guards, Ferencz adopted up with visits, first on the Ohrdruf labor camp in Germany after which on the infamous Buchenwald focus camp. At these camps and later others, he discovered our bodies “piled up like cordwood” and “helpless skeletons with diarrhea, dysentery, typhus, TB, pneumonia, and other ailments, retching in their louse ridden bunks or on the ground with only their pathetic eyes pleading for help,” Ferencz wrote in an account of his life.
“The Buchenwald concentration camp was a charnel house of indescribable horrors,” Ferencz wrote. “There is no doubt that I was indelibly traumatized by my experiences as a war crimes investigator of Nazi extermination centers. I still try not to talk or think about the details.”
At one level towards the tip of the warfare, Ferencz was despatched to Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat within the Bavarian Alps to seek for incriminating paperwork however got here again empty-handed.
After the warfare, Ferencz was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army and returned to New York to start working towards regulation. But that was short-lived. Because of his experiences as a warfare crimes investigator, he was recruited to assist prosecute Nazi warfare criminals on the Nuremberg trials, which had begun beneath the management of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Before leaving for Germany, he married his childhood sweetheart, Gertrude.
At the age of 27, with no earlier trial expertise, Ferencz turned chief prosecutor for a 1947 case by which 22 former commanders had been charged with murdering over 1 million Jews, Romani and different enemies of the Third Reich in Eastern Europe. Rather than relying on witnesses, Ferencz principally relied on official German paperwork to make his case. All the defendants had been convicted, and greater than a dozen had been sentenced to demise by hanging although Ferencz hadn’t requested for the demise penalty.
“At the beginning of April 1948, when the long legal judgment was read, I felt vindicated,” he wrote. “Our pleas to protect humanity by the rule of law had been upheld.”
With the warfare crimes trials winding down, Ferencz went to work for a consortium of Jewish charitable teams to assist Holocaust survivors regain properties, properties, companies, artwork works, Torah scrolls, and different Jewish spiritual objects that had been confiscated from them by the Nazis. He additionally later assisted in negotiations that will result in compensation to the Nazi victims.
In later many years, Ferencz championed the creation of a global court docket which may prosecute any authorities’s leaders for warfare crimes. Those desires had been realized in 2002 with institution of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, although its effectiveness has been restricted by the failure of nations just like the United States to take part.
Ferencz is survived by a son and three daughters. His spouse died in 2019.
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