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THE LAST LIVING prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, who secured guilty verdicts from 22 Nazis and dedicated his life to fighting international injustice, has died at age 103, his son told AFP.
Ben Ferencz, an American who at age 27 and with no prior trial experience served as one of the trials’ chief prosecutors, would go on to later battle for compensation and the return of stolen goods to victims and survivors of the Holocaust.
He died peacefully in his sleep of natural causes Friday evening at an assisted living facility in Boynton Beach, Florida, his son Donald Ferencz said.
The younger Ferencz told AFP that if his father were to have given a last statement, he was sure it would have been “law not war.”
Throughout much of his life, Ferencz advocated for the creation of an international criminal court – a dream that finally came to fruition with the establishment of the Hague-based ICC in 2002.
Today the world lost a leader in the quest for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes. We mourn the death of Ben Ferencz—the last Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor. At age 27, with no prior trial experience, he secured guilty verdicts against 22 Nazis.
— US Holocaust Museum (@HolocaustMuseum) April 8, 2023
The Nuremberg trials set up in Germany in 1945 after World War II laid the foundation for a global criminal justice system for those accused of humankind’s worst atrocities.
“Ben’s unwavering pursuit of a more peaceful and just world spanned almost eight decades and forever shaped how we respond to humanity’s worst crimes,” said Sara Bloomfield, director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
During the Nuremberg trials, Ferencz was tasked with prosecuting leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, special mobile killing units that were responsible for the murder of more than a million people, especially Jews and particularly via mass shootings.
Among the 22 Nazis that he convicted, four were executed.
Ferencz was born in Eastern Europe in 1920, just before his Jewish parents moved the family to the United States.
He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1943 and served in the US Army during World War II, including working for the army’s war crimes branch in which he traveled to newly liberated concentration camps to gather evidence of the atrocities committed inside.
“Camps like Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Dachau are vividly imprinted in my mind’s eye. Even today, when I close my eyes, I witness a deadly vision I can never forget,” the Holocaust Memorial Museum quoted him as saying.
The ICC has stood as the world’s only permanent, independent court for violations like genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for more than two decades.
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RIP. A truly dedicated and great, human being.
Why didn’t he go after Stalin? It’s estimated that that dictator was responsible for the mass genocide of in excess of 10 – 15 million men, women and children (including Jews) prior and during WWII.
@Paul: because the Soviet Union won the war and were on the side of the good guys. Like North Korea and Iran today, you can pretty much kill your own people at will, it’s only when you start on those outside your borders that anybody wakes up.
@Paul Shepherd: the soviet Union won the war?
@Allora: originally they had a non-aggression pact with the Nazis but after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR with Operation Barbarossa they changed sides and joined the allied forces. As the allies were the ultimate victors in WW2 Russia is acknowledged as being part of the winning side.
@Karen Delaney: yes thats correct but the way that that was presented looked as if the soviets won it unilaterally.
@Paul: he was only 27 at the time to be fair. I think if he did “go after” Stalin as well you probably wouldn’t be happy. There’s no pleasing some people.
@Allora: in fairness the soviets counter offensive after the doomed operation Barbarossa was unstoppable.by the time of the Normandy landings the Nazis were incredibly weak and under resourced on that front as Hitler had pulled so many divisions from France to try and stop the soviets.they would have won the war even if the Normandy landings had never happened.
I didn’t know he was that old, watched “Getting away with murder(s)” only last night, highly recommended.
A wonderful man who talked the talk and walked the walk. His determination to bring those involved in the horrific Nazi crimes should be a lesson to all involved in prosecuting crime. RIP
It is perhaps because the issue is so intense when framed as the Holocaust that the majority of readers have turned away yet someone has to demonstrate the ideology which led to the extermination of so many human beings. There is no judge and jury here, just information sharing that the ideology which was behind the actions of an advanced society like Germany still remains within the education system as an achievement-
” Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labour in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival. Wannsee Conference, 1942
” In 500 years how the Anglo-Saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.” Charles Darwin, 1862
I feel sorry for those who died during the invasion, the extermination and fighting on the fields of battle on land, on the sea and in the skies. What can be said for people today who are prepared to maintain the fiction and the sanitised versions of natural selection for the sake of a later science versus religion American variant?
I hope younger readers already know.
@Carrickview: sounds like Palestine
@Sean Padraig O Brien: They fly the swastika in Palestine, so unfortunately you have a point.
Alan, your educational achievements are not determined by your adherence to the truth in the Bible. They are determined by your adherence to the lies espoused by Charles Darwin.
@TheQueenofHibernia:
Darwin was forthright however dangerous and his misguided his and those of Wallace were and remain. It is his followers, even to this day, who try to obscure or lie about the actual conviction and try to say it was social Darwinism that was behind the Nazis and their extermination/invasion policies.
The next time an academic tries to convince you that the Human Race is a social construct or that there is such a thing as social Darwinism, remind them that ‘Favoured Races’ in his main title as an accompanying description of ‘Less Favoured Races’-
‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’ Charles Darwin, 1859
A less favoured ‘race’ looks like this-
” Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts—and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal ‘struggle for existence,’ it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed—and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults.” Charles Darwin, 1871
@Carrickview: The quotes in your post about prevailing celts and saxons were not written by Charles Darwin. You basically took someone else’s writing and attributed Charles Darwin’s name to it. Cutting and Pasting someone’s else’s words and then putting “-Charles Darwin,1877” at the end.
@Carrickview: if you quote Charles Darwin in an online forum in 2023 you’re absolutely a mentalist.
@Diaspora’d:
It is from ‘The Descent of Man’ and the statement was modified by Darwin. There is an online book and chapter V is where you will find the statement in context.
Younger people have enough information to now know that natural selection isn’t about evolution as the biological and geological history of the Earth is written by the fossil record in rock strata where older rock show simpler lifeforms. It is an old research area that was hijacked by natural selection where they tried to imply that black complexion humans were closer biologically to gorillas than the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ -
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.” — Charles Darwin (1871) The Descent of Man.
To exterminate a native culture, they first have to be dehumanised and that is what natural selection did. It is how the Nazis proceeded.
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