Ben Ferencz Wiki – Ben Ferencz Biography
When he succeeded in getting Nazi officers convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity, Ben Ferencz was only 27 years old. Later, he promoted the creation of an international court to try war crimes, an objective that was accomplished in 2002. On Friday night at a Florida assisted care home in Boynton Beach, Ferencz passed away quietly while sleeping.
The US Holocaust Museum confirmed his passing and noted that the world has lost “a leader in the pursuit of justice for genocide victims.” Ferencz was born in Transylvania, a region of Romania, in 1920. However, when he was a little child, his family fled to the US to avoid anti-Semitism, eventually settling in New York.
Ben Ferencz Age
Ben Ferencz was 103 years old.
Ben Ferencz Cause of Death
He joined the US Army after earning his law degree from Harvard in 1943 and participated in the Battle of the Bulge and the Allied landings in Normandy. He eventually joined a group entrusted with looking into and accumulating proof of Nazi war crimes after rising to the rank of Sergeant.
The team, which was based in Germany with the army, would visit concentration camps as they were being freed, noting the circumstances there and speaking with survivors. Ferencz described finding victims “piled up like cordwood” and “helpless skeletons with diarrhoea, dysentery, typhus, TB, pneumonia, and other ailments, retching in their louse-ridden bunks or on the ground with only their pathetic eyes pleading for help.”
One of the largest concentration camps in Germany, Buchenwald, was described by him as a “charnel house of indescribable horrors.” He added, “There is no question that my experiences as a war crimes investigator of Nazi execution sites irreparably damaged me. I continue to make an effort to keep the details to myself.
He went back to New York after the war to resume his legal career, but not long after, despite having no prior trial experience, he was asked to assist in the prosecution of Nazis in the Nuremberg trials. He was appointed chief prosecutor in the trial of members of the Einsatzgruppen, mobile SS killing squads thought to have killed over a million people while operating in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.
Charges were launched against 24 high-ranking Nazi officers following World War Two. Three defendants were freed while 19 were found guilty. Twelve were awarded the death penalty, and ten were put to death. Ferencz, who was proficient in six languages, including German, stayed in West Germany after the trials were over and assisted Jewish organisations in getting a reparations payment from the new administration.
Later in life, he became a professor of international law and advocated for the establishment of an international court with the authority to bring war crime cases against the heads of states. He also wrote several books on the subject. The International Criminal Court was established in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2002, but participation by a number of powerful nations, including the US, has hindered its efficiency. Three girls and a boy survive Ferencz. In 2019, his childhood sweetheart and wife Gertrude Fried passed away.
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