The American Benjamin Ferencz, the last prosecutor of the Nuremberg Tribunal, has died, aged 103, after a life dedicated to international justice, his son announced this Saturday to AFP.
Ferencz died in Florida last night of natural causes in his sleep. “If my father had been able to make one last statement, I’m sure he would have said, ‘The law, not war,’” said Donald Ferencz.
At the age of 27, Benjamin Ferencz led the prosecution of the United States during the Einsatzgruppen trial in 1947. Twenty-two responsible for these mobile extermination units were convicted after their crimes were exposed.
Based on Nazi archives, Ferencz estimated the number of Jewish victims of this “Shoa a bullet” to be over 1 million.
Born in the Carpathians to Jewish parents and a refugee at the age of 10 in the United States, Ferencz studied law at the renowned Harvard University. Mobilized during World War II, he fought in Europe before being tasked with gathering evidence of Nazi crimes.
Ferencz worked on the team of US prosecutors in Nuremberg, the Bavarian city where the Allies tried Nazi crimes, laying the foundations of an international criminal justice system.
Discreet in the press, Ferencz considered, in an interview given in May to the TV channel CBS, that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was “a war criminal”, and that Russia should be judged by the international Justice for what he called “aggression”. ” to Ukraine.
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