Chief prosecutor at Nuremberg trials Benjamin Ferencz dead at 103

9. April 2023

The FIR and its member federations remember Benjamin Ferencz, American prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, who died in Florida at the age of 103. He was the last prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials still living.
After graduating from Harvard Law, he fought in the U.S. Army toward the end of World War II and was involved in the liberation of several concentration camps.
Working in the U.S. occupation administration in Germany after the war ended, the U.S. lawyer investigated Nazi war crimes and, at the age of 27, he got the task of chief prosecutor for the U.S. Army in the so-called Einsatzgruppen trial, one of the twelve successor trials to the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals. The Nazi Einsatzgruppen were responsible for the murder of more than one million people, mostly Jews. Ferencz indicted 24 leading SS men on charges including crimes against humanity and war crimes. Of the 22 convicted in the trial, four were executed.
Later, Ferencz was instrumental in establishing the International Criminal Court. His „unwavering pursuit of a more peaceful and just world spanned nearly eight decades and forever shaped the way we respond to humanity’s worst crimes,“ said Sara Bloomfield, director of the Holocaust Museum in Washington.