Ben Ferencz

Benjamin Berell Ferencz (March 11, 1920 – April 7, 2023) was an American lawyer.

He was an investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II and the chief prosecutor for the United States Army at the Einsatzgruppen trial, one of the 12 subsequent Nuremberg trials held by US authorities at Nuremberg, Germany.

When the Einsatzgruppen reports were discovered, Ferencz pushed for a trial based on their evidence.

When confronted with a lack of staff and resources, he personally volunteered to serve as the prosecutor.

Later he became an advocate of international rule of law and for the establishment of an International Criminal Court.

Ferencz was born on March 11, 1920, in Șomcuta Mare in the historical Transylvania region, into a Jewish family.

A few months later the Treaty of Trianon allocated greater Transylvania, including Șomcuta Mare, to Romania from the Kingdom of Hungary.

When Ferencz was ten months old, his family emigrated to the United States to avoid the persecution of Hungarian Jews by the Kingdom of Romania after Romania took control of Transylvania, Banat, Crisana, and Maramures.

The family settled in New York City, where they lived on the Lower East Side in Manhattan.

Ferencz studied crime prevention at the City College of New York, and his criminal law exam result won him a scholarship to Harvard Law School.

At Harvard, he studied under Roscoe Pound and also did research for Sheldon Glueck, who at that time was writing a book on war crimes.

Ferencz graduated from Harvard in 1943.

After his studies, he joined the US Army.

His time as a soldier in the army began with a job as a typist in Camp Davis in North Carolina; at that time, he did not know how to use a typewriter or fire a weapon.

His job duties also included cleaning toilets and scrubbing pots and floors.

In 1944, he served in the 115th AAA Gun Battalion, an anti-aircraft artillery unit.

He fought in several major battles of the European theatre and was awarded five battle stars.

In 1945, he was transferred to the headquarters of General George S. Patton's Third Army, where he was assigned to a team tasked with setting up a war crimes branch and collecting evidence for such crimes.

In that role, he was sent to the concentration camps the US Army had liberated.

On Christmas 1945, Ferencz was honorably discharged from the Army with the rank of sergeant.

He returned to New York, but was recruited only a few weeks later to participate as a prosecutor (with the simulated rank of Colonel) on the legal team of Telford Taylor in the subsequent Nuremberg trials.

Near the Tempelhof in a building belonging to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin, in the spring of 1946, Ferencz found reports that described in detail, day by day, the Einsatzgruppen's killing of at least one million people from June 1941.

Ferencz then flew to Nuremberg and demanded that the men be put on trial.

Taylor hesitated, since there was a shortage of people and money.

However, after Ferencz offered to personally handle the case, he agreed to have a trial held.

Taylor appointed him chief prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen case—Ferencz's first case.

Of the 24 men he indicted, all were convicted; 13 of them received death sentences, of which four were eventually carried out.

Apart from East Germany, they were the last executions performed on German soil, and in the Federal Republic.

Ferencz stayed in Germany after the Nuremberg trials, together with his wife Gertrude, whom he had married in New York on March 31, 1946.

Together with Kurt May and others, he participated in the setup of reparation and rehabilitation programs for the victims of Nazi persecution, and also had a part in the negotiations that led to the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany signed on September 10, 1952, and the first German Restitution Law in 1953.

In 1956, the family—they had four children by then—returned to the US, where Ferencz entered private law practice as a partner of Telford Taylor.

While pursuing claims of Jewish forced laborers against the Flick concern (the subject of the Flick trial), Ferencz observed the "interesting phenomenon of history and psychology that very frequently the criminal comes to see himself as the victim".

Experiences just after World War II left a defining impression on Ferencz.

After 13 years, and under the influence of the events of the Vietnam War, he left the private law practice and worked for the institution of an International Criminal Court that would serve as a worldwide highest instance for issues of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

He also published several books on this subject.

Already in his first book, Defining International Aggression: The Search for World Peace (1975), he argued for the establishment of such an international court.

From 1985 to 1996, he was an adjunct professor of international law at Pace University.

From 1985 to 1996, Ferencz also worked as an adjunct professor of international law at Pace University at White Plains, New York.

An International Criminal Court was indeed established on July 1, 2002, when the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court came into force.

In a 2005 interview for The Washington Post, he revealed some of his activities during his period in Germany by way of showing how different military legal norms were at the time: