Benjamin Ferenc, prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials, died

Benjamin Ferentz, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials, died in the USA. He was 103 years old.

Ferenc was born in 1920 in Hungary. When he was less than a year old, the family moved to the United States to avoid the persecution of Hungarian Jews. He studied law at Harvard. In 1945, Ferenc joined a group that collected evidence of war criminals of the Nazi army. In particular, he worked in concentration camps liberated by the American army.

At the age of 27, he became a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials – the trial of war criminals. Ferenc acted as a prosecutor in the case of the Einsatzgruppe – a subdivision of the SS, engaged in the mass extermination of people in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe and the USSR. The case involved 22 defendants accused of murdering a total of more than 1 million people. All of them were found guilty, 13 of them were sentenced to death.

After the Nuremberg Trials, Ferenc engaged in programs of reparations and restitution – compensation by Germany for the damage to the peoples and countries that suffered from Nazism. He took part in the creation of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, a pedestrian path in this city is named after him.