Benjamin Ferencz, the last prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, has died

American Benjamin Ferencz, the last prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, has died at the age of 103 after a life devoted to international justice, his son said Saturday.

He died “peacefully in his sleep” on Friday night in Florida (southeast of the US), “of natural causes”, Donald Ferencz added.

“If my father could have made one last statement, he would undoubtedly have said: the law, not war,” he reflected.

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 in Eastern Europe, were convicted after they realized the scale of the crimes.

Based on the Nazi archives, Ferencz estimated that over a million Jews were killed in this “Holocaust by bullets”.

Born in the European mountainous region of the Carpathians, in a Jewish family, he fled to the United States, where he studied law at Harvard University.

During World War II, it was initially deployed to European battlefields before being tasked with gathering evidence of Nazi crimes.

In a book published in 1988, he explained that he was forever marked by the liberation of the extermination camps. “I can never forget the deadly sight of the crematoriums… and the emaciated bodies piled up like firewood,” he wrote.

On 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 and laid the foundations for an international criminal justice system.

He then worked in Europe on rehabilitation programs for victims of Nazi persecution.

Upon his return to the United States, he devoted himself to private law. Because of the Vietnam War, he campaigned for the establishment of an international criminal court.

In a rarer May interview with US television channel CBS, he said in recent years that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “a war criminal” and that Russia should be condemned by international justice “for aggression” in Ukraine.