Ben Ferencz: Final surviving Nuremberg trials prosecutor dies aged 103

Ben Ferencz, the final surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials in Germany, has died on the age of 103.

Mr Ferencz was an inexperienced 27-year-old when he turned chief prosecutor for the US within the trial of twenty-two officers who had been a part of Einsatzgruppen.

The cell killing squads had been a part of Germany’s Nazi forces through the Second World War and the officers had been charged in 1947 with murdering multiple million Jews, gypsies and different minorities in jap Europe.

In his opening assertion, Mr Ferencz stated: “It is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenceless men, women, and children.

“This was the tragic fulfilment of a programme of intolerance and conceitedness.

“Vengeance is not our goal, nor do we seek merely a just retribution.

“We ask this courtroom to affirm by worldwide penal motion man’s proper to dwell in peace and dignity no matter his race or creed.

“The case we present is a plea of humanity to law.”

People ‘condemned within the Nazi thoughts’

He instructed the courtroom that the officers had methodically carried out long-range plans to exterminate ethnic, nationwide, political and spiritual teams “condemned in the Nazi mind”.

“Genocide – the extermination of whole categories of human beings – was a foremost instrument of the Nazi doctrine.”

All of the defendants had been convicted and 13 of them had been sentenced to loss of life by hanging, regardless that Mr Ferencz had not requested for the loss of life penalty.

‘An perception into the mentality of mass murderers’

Mr Ferencz was born in Romania in 1920 and was 10 months previous when his household moved to the US.

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1943, he joined the navy and fought in Europe earlier than becoming a member of the military’s newly-formed warfare crimes part.

It was after the top of the warfare in 1945 that he was recruited to affix the US prosecution staff at Nuremberg and in a 2018 interview with the American Bar Association, he stated: “What was most significant about it was it gave us and it gave me an insight into the mentality of mass murderers.

“They had murdered over 1,000,000 individuals, together with a whole lot of 1000’s of youngsters in chilly blood, and I wished to grasp how it’s that educated individuals – a lot of them had PhDs or they had been generals within the German military – couldn’t solely tolerate however lead and commit such horrible crimes.”

‘The next war will make the last one look like child’s play’

Later, Mr Ferencz worked for Jewish charities helping Holocaust survivors regain property, businesses, religious items and other assets that had been stolen by the Nazis.

He also advocated for the creation of an international criminal court – the tribunal that was finally established in 2002 and now sits at The Hague in the Netherlands, albeit without the participation of some major countries such as the US.

Mr Ferencz was critical of his country’s actions in the war, particularly in Vietnam, saying in 2018: “The motive I’ve continued to commit most of my life to stopping warfare is my consciousness that the subsequent warfare will make the final one appear like kid’s play.”

Mr Ferencz died at Boynton Beach in Florida on Saturday.

His spouse Gertrude died in 2019 however he’s survived by a son and three daughters.