APRIL 20 • 2023 | 61

B

enjamin Ferencz, the last surviv-
ing member of the prosecuting 
team at the Nuremberg trials that 
convicted Nazi ringleaders for crimes 
against humanity, died April 7, 2023, in 
Florida. He was 103.
Ferencz was 27 and a graduate of 
Harvard Law School when he was 
named as the chief prosecutor at the 
Einsatzgruppen Trial, in which 20 mem-
bers of the SS’s mobile death squads were 
convicted of war crimes and crimes against 
humanity. Two others were convicted of 
membership in a criminal organization. 
Slight and boyish-looking, he is seen 
in newsreel footage of the trials speaking 
deliberately and passionately in an accent 
shaped by his upbringing in 
Manhattan. “Vengeance is 
not our goal, nor do we seek 
merely a just retribution,
” he 
tells the tribunal. “We ask this 
court to affirm by internation-
al 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.
”
Ferencz would go on 
to play a key role on the 
team that negotiated the 
watershed 1952 reparations 
agreements under which West 
Germany agreed to pay $822 million to the 
State of Israel and to groups representing 
Holocaust survivors, as well as to direct 
the office seeking to recover assets of Jews 
who were murdered. Ferencz was featured 
in two recent documentaries about the 
Holocaust and its aftermath: Ken Burns’ 
PBS series, The U.S. and the Holocaust, and 
Reckonings: The First Reparations, a 2022 
film funded by the German government 
with support by the Conference on Jewish 
Material Claims Against Germany. 
In a statement about the latter film and 
his role in the reparations negotiations, 
Ferencz said: “
At the time, we were just try-
ing to do what was right. Looking back, I 
can see that it was this work, the legal work 
of negotiating agreements and finding jus-
tice, that led to peace. It is the indemnifica-

tion that allowed both Israel and Germany 
to find a peaceful path forward and rebuild 
themselves on the world stage.
”
In December 2022, the U.S. Congress 
awarded him the Congressional Gold 
Medal, its highest honor, thanks to lobby-
ing by six House members led by Rep. Lois 
Frankel, the Florida Democrat.
“Ben Ferencz was a giant,
” said 
Menachem Rosensaft, the general counsel 
and associate executive vice president of 
the World Jewish Congress, in a statement. 
“He devoted himself to the very end of his 
long and distinguished career to making 
sure that the lessons of Nuremberg would 
become engrained in both international 
law and the consciousness of society as a 
whole.
”
Born in Transylvania in 1920, 
Ferencz immigrated to the 
United States with his Jewish 
family as an infant. They settled 
in Manhattan, where he attended 
City College of New York 
before heading to law school 
at Harvard. He joined the U.S. 
Army after graduation, where he 
was eventually assigned to the 
headquarters of Gen. George S. 
Patton’s Third Army and a team 
tasked with collecting evidence 
for war crimes. At Buchenwald, 
he once recalled, “I saw 
crematoria still going. The bodies starved, 
lying dying, on the ground. I’ve seen the 
horrors of war more than can be adequately 
described.
”
Ferencz was a civilian by the time he led 
the team at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, one of 
the “Subsequent” Nuremberg proceedings 
that followed the 1945-1946 International 
Military Tribunal. The Subsequent trials, 
held between 1946 and 1949, were held by 
U.S. military courts and dealt with cases 
of crimes against humanity, the use of 
slave labor and atrocities against prisoners 
of war and partisans. Of all the cases 
brought against Nazis, the Einsatzgruppen 
Trial, which lasted from September 1947 
until April 1948, was the only one to 
have Holocaust crimes as its major focus.
After the trials Ferencz became director-

general of the Jewish Restitution Successor 
Organization and fought for compensation 
for victims and survivors of the Holocaust 
and the return of stolen assets. He entered 
private law practice, and later worked for 
the institution of the International Criminal 
Court, which was established in 2002. He 
was fiercely critical of the decision by the 
United States not to ratify the treaty that 
established the court. “War-making itself 
is the supreme international crime against 
humanity and … it should be deterred 
by punishment universally, wherever and 
whenever offenders are apprehended,
” he 
wrote in 2018.
From 1985 to 1996, he was an adjunct 
professor of international law at Pace 
University in Manhattan. He eventually 
retired to South Florida, but remained 
vocal in his opposition to war. 
Ferencz is survived by a son and three 
daughters. His wife Gertrude died in 2019.
In 2017, the Municipality of The Hague 
honored Ferencz for his achievements by 
naming the footpath adjacent to the Peace 
Palace — which houses the International 
Court of Justice — after him. That same 
year, following a $1 million renewable gift 
from Ferencz, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial 
Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the 
Prevention of Genocide launched the 
Ferencz International Justice Initiative. 

Nuremberg Prosecutor 
Ben Ferencz Dies at 103

ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL JTA

Prosecutor Benjamin 
Ferencz at the 
Einsatzgruppen Trial 
in Nuremberg, which 
lasted from September 
1947 until April 1948. 

WIKIPEDIA

ADAM JONES/WIKIPEDIA

In 2012, Benjamin Ferencz poses in Courtroom 
600 of the Palace of Justice, where the 
Nuremberg Trials were held 65 years earlier. 

