The American Benjamin Ferencz, the last prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, has died at the age of 103 after a life dedicated to international justice, his son said this Saturday.
He died “peacefully in his sleep” on Friday night in Florida (southeastern US), “of natural causes,” added Donald Ferencz.
“If my father had been able to make one last statement, he would surely have said: the law, not war,” he considered.
At the age of 27, Benjamin Ferencz led the prosecution, for the United States, in the Einsatzgruppen trial in 1947. The 22 responsible for these mobile extermination units, which followed the Nazi advance into Eastern Europe, were convicted after exposing the scope of crimes
Drawing on Nazi archives, Ferencz estimated that more than a million Jews were killed in this “Holocaust by bullets.”
Born in the European mountainous region of the Carpathians, into a Jewish family, he took refuge in the United States, where he studied law at Harvard University.
During World War II, it was initially deployed on European battlefields, before taking it upon itself to collect evidence of Nazi crimes.
In a book published in 1988, he explained that he was forever marked by the liberation from the death camps. “I can never forget the deadly sight of the crematoria… and the emaciated bodies piled up like firewood,” he wrote.
Upon his return to civilian life, he was recruited to join the team of US prosecutors in Nuremberg, the Bavarian city where the Allies tried Nazi crimes in 13 trials, laying the foundations for an international criminal justice system.
He then worked in Europe on reparation programs for victims of Nazi persecution.
Returning to the United States, he devoted himself to private law. Due to the Vietnam War, he campaigned for the creation of an international criminal court.
More discreet in recent years, he said, in a rare interview in May with the US television network CBS, that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “a war criminal” and that Russia should be tried by international justice “for aggression” in Ukraine.
Source: TSF
