Ben Ferenc, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials of Nazi criminals, has died at the age of 103.
Ben Ferenc has been called “a leader in the search for justice for victims of genocide.” By the time the Nuremberg trials ended, sending several dozen Nazi criminals to prison and the gallows, Ferenc was only 27 years old.
Criminal investigations
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1943, he joined the US Army and participated in the Allied landings in Normandy and the Ardennes operation. Ferenc rose to the rank of sergeant and, at the end of the war, joined a group tasked with investigating and gathering evidence of Nazi war crimes.
The group was part of the American army in Germany and visited concentration camps as they were being liberated, documenting conditions there and interviewing survivors.
Later, Ferenc said he found corpses “stacked like logs” and “helpless skeletons, sick with diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid, tuberculosis, pneumonia and other diseases, writhing in their bed, eaten by lice, or simply on the ground with eyes. asking for help.”
He described Buchenwald – one of the largest camps in Germany – as “a hall of indescribable horrors.”
“I was never traumatized by my experience as a war crimes investigator in the Nazi extermination camps,” he wrote. “I still try not to talk or think about these details.”
“Even now, when I close my eyes, I see a deadly vision that I will never forget – the crematoria burning with the flames of burning flesh, piles of piled emaciated corpses waiting to be burned . I looked at hell,” he recalled. .
Selective Justice
After the war, Ferenc returned to New York to practice law, but was soon brought in to prosecute the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials, despite his lack of experience in such trials.
A young American lawyer is sent to Nuremberg to collect evidence in one of 12 secondary trials dealing with acts of genocide committed by the SS.
He was the chief prosecutor in the trial of members of the Einsatzgruppen, the SS death squads that operated in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe and are estimated to have killed more than a million people.
There were only 22 defendants in the main Nuremberg trial of Nazi regime leaders, he said, although prosecutors had a list of 3,000 people who participated in massacres and other war crimes.
However, it was impossible to test all of them due to the lack of dock areas. Therefore, according to Ferenc, justice at Nuremberg was only selective.
Of the 22 people involved in the case, all were convicted, of which 13 were sentenced to death, and four eventually went to the scaffold.
After the trials ended, Ferenc, who was fluent in six languages, including German, remained in West Germany and helped Jewish organizations obtain reparations from the new government.
international Court
In the last years of his life, he became a professor of international law and advocated the creation of an international court that could prosecute government leaders convicted of war crimes, and wrote several books about subject.
As a result, the International Criminal Court was established in The Hague in 2002, but due to the fact that a number of large countries, including the United States, Russia and China, do not recognize its jurisdiction, its effectiveness is hardly perfect. .
Source: korrespondent
I am David Wyatt, a professional writer and journalist for Buna Times. I specialize in the world section of news coverage, where I bring to light stories and issues that affect us globally. As a graduate of Journalism, I have always had the passion to spread knowledge through writing.