Last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor dies at 103
THE last surviving prosecutor from the post-World War Two Nuremberg trials, Ben Ferencz has died at 103.
Ferencz was just 27 when he secured the convictions of Nazi officers for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
He later advocated the establishment of an international court to prosecute war crimes, a goal realised in 2002.
Ferencz died peacefully in his sleep on Friday evening at an assisted living facility in Boynton Beach, Florida.
Confirming his death, the America Holocaust Museum said the world had lost a leader in the quest for justice for victims of genocide.
Ferencz was born in Transylvania part of Romania in 1920, but his family emigrated to American when he was young to escape antisemitism, later settling in New York.
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1943, he enlisted in the America Army and took part in the Allied landings at Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. He rose to the rank of Sergeant and ultimately joined a team tasked with investigating and gathering evidence of Nazi war crimes.
The team was based with the army in Germany and would enter concentration camps as they were liberated, taking notes on conditions in each and interviewing survivors.
In a later account of his life, Ferencz spoke of finding bodies piled up like cordwood and helpless skeletons with diarrhoea, 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.
He described Buchenwald one of the largest camps inside Germany as a charnel house of indescribable horrors.
“There is no doubt that I was indelibly traumatised by my experiences as a war crimes investigator of Nazi extermination centres. I still try not to talk or think about the details,” he wrote.
After the war, he returned to New York to practice law, but shortly afterwards was recruited to help prosecute Nazi sat the Nuremberg trials, despite having no prior trial experience.
He was made chief prosecutor at the trial of members of the Einsatzgruppen, mobile SS death squads that operated within Nazi- occupied Eastern European dare estimated to have murdered more than a million people.