The last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials against the Nazis after World War II, Ben Ferencz, has died at the age of 103.

Ferencz was among the first from outside to enter and document what happened in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps.

He died Friday night in Boynton Beach, Florida, said Professor John Barrett, who blogs about the Nuremberg trials. The Washington Holocaust Museum confirms the news.

– Today the world lost a leader in the fight for justice for victims of genocide and similar crimes, the museum wrote on Twitter.

Ferencz was born in Transylvania in present-day Romania in 1920. He moved as a small boy to New York with his parents fleeing anti-Semitism in their home country. He studied at Harvard and joined the army to participate in the liberation of Europe.

When he heard information about what had happened in the concentration camps, he went to collect evidence. Among other things, he visited the Buchenwald camp where more than 56,000 people died. Several Norwegian political prisoners were sent to the camp.

– The Buchenwald concentration camp was a morgue of indescribable horrors. There is no doubt that I have been traumatized by my experiences as an investigator in war crimes cases. I always try to avoid talking about it or thinking about it, he writes in his biography.

At the Nuremberg trials, he was given the responsibility of prosecuting 22 former commanders accused of killing over a million Jews and other ethnic groups.

All of the defendants in the Ferencz case were found guilty and more than a dozen were sentenced to death.

(© NTB)