Florida [US], April 10: Ben Ferencz, the last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, who tried Nazis for genocidal war crimes and was among the first outside witnesses to document the atrocities of Nazi labour and concentration camps, has died at 103 on Friday in Boynton Beach, Florida, according to St. John's University law professor John Barrett, who blogs about the trials. "Today, the world lost a leader in the quest for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes," the US Holocaust Museum in Washington tweeted. The New York Times reported that Ferencz died at an assisted living facility in Boynton Beach, Florida.
Born on March 11, 1920, in Transylvania, Romania, Ferencz was ten months old when his family moved to the US to escape antisemitism. He grew up poor in New York City's Hell's Kitchen. Graduating from Harvard Law School, Ferencz joined the US Army to participate in the Normandy invasion during World War II. Using his legal background, he became an investigator of Nazi war crimes against US soldiers as part of a new War Crimes Section of the Judge Advocate's Office. He seized documents and recorded evidence at Nazi death camps such as Buchenwald after their liberation by Allied forces, surveying scenes of human misery, including piles of emaciated corpses and the crematoria where bodies were incinerated.
When US intelligence reports described soldiers encountering large groups of starving people in Nazi camps watched over by SS guards, Ferencz visited them, first at the Ohrdruf labour camp in Germany and then at Buchenwald concentration camp. At many camps, he found 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," Ferencz later wrote. "The Buchenwald concentration camp was 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. I still try not to talk or think about the details."
Toward the war's end, Ferencz was sent to Hitler's mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps to search for documents but returned empty-handed. After the war, Ferencz was discharged from the Army and returned to his New York practice. But soon, he was recruited to help prosecute Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials under the US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Before leaving for Germany, he married his childhood sweetheart Gertrude. He was just 27 years old when he served as a chief prosecutor in 1947 at Nuremberg, where Nazi defendants, including Hermann Goring, faced trials for crimes against humanity, including the Holocaust genocide in which millions of Jewish, Romani and other enemies of the Third Reich in Eastern Europe were systematically killed. He tried the 22 officers who led mobile paramilitary killing squads known as Einsatzgruppen, which carried out mass killings and were part of the Nazi SS. "It is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenceless men, women, and children," Ferencz said in his opening statement. "This was the tragic fulfilment of a program of intolerance and arrogance. Vengeance is not our goal, nor do we seek merely a just retribution. We ask this court to affirm by international penal action man's right to live in peace and dignity regardless of his race or creed. The case we present is a plea of humanity to law," Ferencz added. Ferencz told the court that the accused officers methodically carried out long-range plans to exterminate ethnic, national, political and religious groups "condemned in the Nazi mind." "Genocide - the extermination of whole categories of human beings - was a foremost instrument of the Nazi doctrine," Ferencz said.
Rather than depending on witnesses, Ferencz mostly relied on official German documents to make his case. All the defendants were convicted, and 13 were sentenced to death by hanging even though Ferencz hadn't asked for the death penalty.
"At the beginning of April 1948, when the long legal judgment was read, I felt vindicated," he wrote. "Our pleas to protect humanity by the rule of law had been upheld." With the war crimes trials winding down, Ferenczworkedfor consortium of Jewish charities to help survivors regain homes, businesses, artworks and Torah scrolls confiscated from them.
Source: Qatar Tribune