The death of the last prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials

Benjamin Ferenich moved with his parents from Transylvania to the United States when he was ten months old due to rising anti-Semitism in Europe. He studied law in the United States at Harvard University.

In 1943 he joined the US Army. There he joined a newly created military unit to investigate war crimes in Germany.

Concentration camp researcher

In 1945, Ferencs was one of the first researchers to collect evidence of crimes committed in concentration camps. He visited, among other things, the Buchenwald concentration camps and the Ohrdruf camp, which was an unofficial part of Buchenwald. Tens of thousands of people died in these camps.

He said on his website that he’s been to more camps “and they were all more or less the same”. Corpses were scattered on the ground, and bodies of people who were made of skin and bones were piled up like firewood near the incinerators.

He also met survivors who looked like helpless skeletons. They had dysentery, typhoid, tuberculosis, pneumonia and other diseases. He said he had the feeling he “got a look at hell”.

prosecutor

After leaving the US Army, Ferencs, aged 27, became the chief prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen trial, one of the trials held in Nuremberg, Germany after World War II. The Einsatzgruppen were Nazi death squads. In Eastern Europe they killed an estimated one million people.

Of the 3,000 personnel who made up the squadron, Ferenc chose 22 to be put on trial. “We couldn’t bring all these 3,000 people to court,” he told Neosur in 2017. So I made a selection based on rank in the army and level of education. They were all highly educated men who held high positions. All 22 accused were found guilty. 13 of them were sentenced to death.

International Criminal Court

After the trial, Ferens went to work at the New York law firm of Telford Taylor. Like Ferench, Taylor was a prosecutor at one of the Nuremberg trials. Ferenich campaigned for financial compensation for Holocaust survivors, among other things.

He was also a strong advocate for the establishment of the International Criminal Court. This came in 2002 and, at the age of 91, he made the closing argument in the case against Thomas Lubanga, the first accused to be transferred to the International Criminal Court.