Last living Nuremberg prosecutor and South Floridian dies at 103

DELRAY BEACH — Ben Ferencz, the last living prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials, has died at age 103, a friend of the family confirmed to the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

He died Friday night, said Sharyn Bey, a friend of his who spent nearly a decade filming him for historic archives and speaking engagements. He had just turned 103 in March.

The Delray Beach resident was only 27 in 1948 when he prosecuted 22 members of the Nazi killing squads in what is regarded as “the biggest murder trial in history.” All 22 were convicted.

Ferencz was alsoone of the last living witnesses of the Holocaust. As a war crimes investigator, he visited the concentration camps during the liberation and documented Nazi crimes.

“Camps like Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Dachau are vividly imprinted in my mind’s eye,” Ferencz told the Florida Jewish Journal in 2022. “Even today, when I close my eyes, I witness a deadly vision I can never forget.”

Ferencz was born on March 11, 1920, in Transylvania, what is now Hungary. That same year, his family fled persecution of Hungarian Jews in Romania, moving to the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Ben Ferencz, shown in this undated family photo, died Friday at age 103. Ferencz was a Delray Beach resident and the last living prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials. When he was 27, he was the Chief Prosecutor for the United States in the Einsatzgruppen case that successfully prosecuted 22 Nazi officials. (Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun Sentinel)

In 1940, he attended Harvard Law School on a scholarship. He enlisted in the U.S Army in 1943, where he marched with the troops before becoming a war crimes investigator, gathering evidence that could be used in court.

Ferencz visited concentration camps as they were liberated to gather evidence of Nazi crimes, such as death registries that contained victims’ names. He then became the Chief Prosecutor in the trial of the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi killing squads assigned to murder Jews and others deemed “inferior.” Einsatzgruppen was the ninth of 12 trials held by the U.S. government in occupied Germany.

“It was like a contest, how many can you kill in a day,” Bey said. “They kept immaculate records and he found the records. He had an adding machine and he said, ‘When I got to a million, I stopped.’ ”

The court found 20 defendants guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and two guilty of a lesser charge. Fourteen defendants were sentenced to death, more than in any other of the Nuremberg proceedings.

“It is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenseless men, women, and children,” he stated in his opening remarks presented before the trial.

“This was the tragic fulfillment of a program of intolerance and arrogance. Vengeance is not our goal, nor do we seek merely a just retribution. We ask this Court to affirm by international 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.”

After the trial, Ferencz worked to get survivors restitution and return their assets, he said in a newspaper interview. Later, in the 1970s, he helped establish the International Criminal Court.

[ RELATED: South Floridian, last living Nuremberg prosecutor, to receive Congressional Gold Medal ]

In 2022, he received a Congressional Gold Medal, though he was unable to attend the ceremony due to poor health.

“Mr. Ferencz is a hero of the Jewish community who has dedicated decades of his life to combatting antisemitism, prosecuting those who act on their hatred, and keeping the lessons of the Holocaust alive,” said U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel, a Democrat who represents most of Palm Beach County and co-led the effort to honor him.

Ferencz first lived in New York, spending his winters in South Florida. Then he moved there permanently, “probably because of the weather,” Bey said.

People from all over the world would ask Ferencz to speak, and Bey would film him from his tiny apartment in Delray Beach. He never prepared his remarks, but he would watch the recordings afterwards and critique them.

As rates of antisemitism rise across the country and in South Florida, some fear that history could repeat itself.

[ RELATED: Antisemitic incidents surge in Florida, growing more than nationwide. ‘More bold, more egregious and more attention-grabbing.’ ]

But Forencz was always optimistic.

“We are gradually moving towards a more civilized world,” he told the Florida Jewish Journal in 2022.

Though his own memories of the Holocaust have gone with him, Forencz leaves behind physical reminders of what he witnessed. His legal pad with notes from the trial is currently in the Library of Congress, Bey said.

“That stuff is archival, it’s not going away,” she added. “What needs to be done is, this wave of racism that our country is enduring right now, it needs to be met. It needs to be met with the truth.”

Information from the Sun Sentinel Archives was used in this report.