1 of 1 Image of Benjamin Ferencz in 1947 — Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Via Wikipedia Image of Benjamin Ferencz in 1947 — Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Via Wikipedia
Attorney Benjamin Ferencz, who was involved in the court in Nuremberg, died this Friday (7) at the age of 103 in the US state of Florida. He became known for acting in the verdict condemning the leaders of the German Nazi regime in the second half of the 1940s. Some were sentenced to death.
Ferencz, then 27, was the last remaining prosecutor to be in Nuremberg (more on that later in this article).
The lawyer was born in Transylvania, which is now part of Romania, but emigrated to the USA as a child. Until he went to school in the USA, he spoke no English, only Yiddish, a language derived from German and spoken by European Jews, which was also widespread in neighborhoods such as New York.
Ferencz was the first in the family to get higher education: he graduated from Harvard with a law degree. A war crimes specialist, he enlisted in the army in the middle of World War II, but did not go to the combat zone, as he was quickly drafted into the unit responsible for collecting evidence of Nazi crimes.
According to the Washington Post newspaper, the lawyer visited several Nazi concentration camps.
- The lessons the world has not learned from the war, according to the last living prosecutor to try the Nazis
- 75 Years of Nuremberg Trials: What Have Psychological Tests Revealed About Nazis?
Ferencz in Nuremberg
After the war, Ferencz returned to the United States and became a civil attorney for General Telford Taylor, the United States’ chief prosecutor in Nuremberg. The main Nazi leaders had already been sentenced when Ferencz began to act in court.
In this phase the following was processed:
- Nazi doctors who experimented on concentration camp prisoners.
- Businessmen who used concentration camp prisoners as slaves.
- A paramilitary group of Nazis that killed civilians, mainly by gunfire, called itself the Einsatzgruppen.
Ferencz was responsible for tracking this last group. These Nazi death squads traveled to different cities, killing civilians at each location. In Kiev, Ukraine, this group killed an estimated 34,000 Jews.
The researchers were able to find documents from the task forces, which Ferencz called murder receipts.
Watch the video below about 75 years of Nuremberg:
Nuremberg Tribunal turns 75