Benjamin Ferencz

Benjamin Ferencz is the only surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, which, soon after the conclusion of WWII, held Nazi leaders to account for war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated during the war. Specifically, Mr. Ferencz was the Chief Prosecutor of the Einsatzgruppen case, in which 22 high-ranking Nazis were convicted of slaughtering over a million innocent men, women, and children. Just 27 years old at the time, Ferencz was named to prosecute this case since it resulted from facts he unearthed as part of the fifty-person team charged by the US after the war with investigating Nazi crimes, including genocide.

A child of immigrants, Mr. Ferencz entered Harvard Law School on a scholarship in 1940, where he did his initial research into the topic of war crimes. After graduating from Harvard Law in 1943 he served in the U.S. Army in Europe, fighting under General Patton. With his strong legal background, he was recruited to join the War Crimes Branch of the Army as combat was concluding, and in this capacity witnessed first-hand the atrocities of the concentration camps.

“Nuremberg taught me,” Mr. Ferencz has written, “that creating a world of tolerance and compassion would be a long and arduous task. And I learned that if we did not devote ourselves to developing effective world law, the same cruel mentality that made the Holocaust possible might one day destroy the entire human race.” After Nuremberg, Mr. Ferencz commited himself to the creation of world law, and was among those responsible for the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998. This is a major achievement, but Ferencz cautions us that the work will remain incomplete until all states accept that they do not have “a sovereign right to wage war,” and that the ICC has the capacity to prosecute “illegal armed force as a crime against humanity.”