From the BBC:
“Ben Ferencz: Last surviving
Nuremberg prosecutor dies, aged 103”
The last surviving prosecutor from
the post-World War Two Nuremberg trials has died aged 103. Ben Ferencz was just
27 when he secured the convictions of Nazi officers for war crimes and crimes
against humanity. He later advocated for 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 US 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 the US when he was young
to escape antisemitism, later settling in New York. After graduating from
Harvard Law School in 1943, he enlisted in the US 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,"
he wrote. "I still try not to talk or think about the details."
After the war, he returned to New York
to practice law, but shortly afterwards was recruited to help prosecute Nazis
at 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 Europe and are estimated to
have murdered more than a million people. After World War Two, charges were
brought against 24 senior Nazi officials. Nineteen were convicted, with three
acquitted. Twelve were given death sentences, and 10 were executed. After the
trials ended, Ferencz - who was fluent in six languages, including German -
remained in West Germany and helped Jewish groups obtain a reparations
settlement from the new government.
In his later years, he became a
professor of international law and campaigned for an international court that
could prosecute the leaders of governments found to have committed war crimes,
writing several books on the subject. In 2002, the International Criminal Court
was set up in The Hague, Netherlands, although its effectiveness has been
limited by the refusal of several major countries, including the US, to take
part. Ferencz is survived by a son and three daughters. His wife - childhood
sweetheart Gertrude Fried - died in 2019.
^ A part of history has passed. ^
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.