Benjamin Ferencz at the podium, in Courtroom 600, Palace of Justice, Nuremberg. 1947 (Photo courtesy of John Q. Barrett)
The last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials in Germany has died.
Benjamin Ferencz was 103.
Ferencz, a Harvard-educated lawyer, secured convictions of numerous German officers who led roving death squads during the war. The New York Times reported that Ferencz died at an assisted living facility in Boynton Beach, Florida.
Beginning in Spring 1946, Ferencz served as a prosecutor in Nuremberg, in the U.S. occupation zone of what had been Nazi Germany.
During 1947 and 1948, Ferencz was chief prosecutor of the Einsatzgruppen case. It was his first case as a lawyer. He charged the defendants, leaders of Nazi killing operations in Eastern Europe, with crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in criminal Nazi organizations.
More than twenty Einsatzgruppen defendants were convicted of killing almost one million people. The Einsatzgruppen case was and is the biggest murder trial in human history.
Ben Ferencz returned to the United States in the 1950s.
For the rest of his life, he was a lawyer for Holocaust survivors, a law teacher, a writer, a lecturer around the world, a lobbyist for and a builder of international legal institutions, and a force for world progress toward peace through law.
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