BOYNTON BEACH, Fla. — Ben Ferencz, the last living prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials, has died at age 103, his son confirmed to the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
He died in his sleep Friday night at an assisted living home in Boynton Beach, Don Ferencz said. He had just turned 103 in March.
The South Florida resident was only 27 in 1948 when he prosecuted 22 members of the Nazi killing squads in what is regarded as “the biggest murder trial in history.” He had never been in a courtroom before. All 22 were convicted.
Ferencz was also one of the last living witnesses of the Holocaust. As a war crimes investigator, Ferencz visited the concentration camps during the liberation and documented Nazi crimes.
“Camps like Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Dachau are vividly imprinted in my mind’s eye,” Ferencz told the Florida Jewish Journal in 2022. “Even today, when I close my eyes, I witness a deadly vision I can never forget.”
Ferencz helped strengthen international law to prevent atrocities like the ones he saw from happening again. Though he is no longer here to speak of what he witnessed, his son believes that his legacy will endure.
“I wouldn’t say the message dies with the man,” Don Ferencz said. “I would say the message lives on.”
Ferencz was born on March 11, 1920, in Transylvania, what is now Hungary. That same year, his family fled persecution of Hungarian Jews in Romania, moving to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York.
In 1940, he attended Harvard Law School on a scholarship. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1943, where he marched with the troops before becoming a war crimes investigator, gathering evidence that could be used in court.
Ferencz visited concentration camps as they were liberated to gather evidence of Nazi crimes, such as death registries that contained victims’ names. He then became the chief prosecutor in the trial of the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi killing squads assigned to murder Jews and others deemed “inferior.” Einsatzgruppen was the ninth of 12 trials held by the U.S. government in occupied Germany.
“It was like a contest, how many can you kill in a day,” said Sharyn Bey, a friend of Ferencz who spent nearly a decade filming him for historic archives and speaking engagements. “They kept immaculate records and he found the records. He had an adding machine and he said, ‘When I got to a million, I stopped.’”
The court found 20 defendants guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and two guilty of a lesser charge. Fourteen defendants were sentenced to death, more than in any other of the Nuremberg proceedings.
“It is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenseless men, women, and children,” Ferencz stated in his opening remarks presented before the trial.
“This was the tragic fulfillment 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.”
After the trial, Ferencz worked to get survivors restitution and return their assets, he said in a newspaper interview. Later, in the 1970s, he helped establish the International Criminal Court.
He had four children, Keri, Robin, Don and Nina.
Don Ferencz recalled how, when they were growing up, his father would go around the dinner table every night and ask them, ‘what have you done for mankind today?’”
“There wasn’t much we could report other than helping mom with the dishes and setting the table,” his son said.
It wasn’t until he was older that he appreciated what his father had done.
In 2022, Ferencz received a Congressional Gold Medal, though he was unable to attend the ceremony due to poor health.
“Mr. Ferencz is a hero of the Jewish community who has dedicated decades of his life to combating antisemitism, prosecuting those who act on their hatred, and keeping the lessons of the Holocaust alive,” said U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel, a Democrat who represents most of Palm Beach County and co-led the effort to honor him.
Ferencz first came to South Florida as a snowbird, spending most of his time in New York. He moved to the area more permanently in 2019, after his wife died, his son said.
He lived in an apartment in Kings Point near Delray Beach for several years, before moving to the Boynton Beach assisted living home in February.
Ferencz continued his advocacy well into his old age, both in South Florida and internationally. People from all over the world would ask Ferencz to speak, and Bey would film him from his tiny apartment. He never prepared his remarks, but he would watch the recordings afterwards and critique them.
Friends, historians, and figures within the international human rights community took to social media to commemorate Ferencz Saturday.
“He was relentless in his commitment to memory, history and justice,” Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, wrote in a statement. “It was an honor to know him and have him donate his collection to the Museum.”
Dan Skinner, who ran Ferencz’ website and social media, described him as a “friend and mentor of more than 25 years.”
“I will have more to say about this over the coming days,” he tweeted. “But let us be filled with gratitude that we had him, in all his wisdom, for so long.”
Despite the progress made since 1948, some fear that history could repeat itself. Rates of antisemitism are rising across the country and in South Florida. Internationally, war crimes continue, most recently in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which Don Ferencz said concerned his father.
Ferencz “strengthened the rule of law so that the Holocaust wouldn’t happen again and illegal war-making wouldn’t happen again,” his son said. “And of course we know it’s happened again and again and again.”
But Ferencz was always optimistic.
“We are gradually moving towards a more civilized world,” he told the Florida Jewish Journal in 2022.
Ferencz also leaves behind physical reminders of what he witnessed. His legal pad with notes from the trial is currently in the Library of Congress, Bey said.
“That stuff is archival, it’s not going away,” she added. “What needs to be done is, this wave of racism that our country is enduring right now, it needs to be met. It needs to be met with the truth.”
Don Ferencz later took up his father’s legacy, working to train NATO lawyers on the crime of aggression. He is now retired.
His father’s parenting methods often seemed to echo his beliefs about the world.
If one of his siblings made a mess, his son recalled, Ferencz would say, ‘don’t leave the place the way you found it. Leave it the way you’d like to have found it.’”
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(Information from the Sun Sentinel archives was used in this report.)
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