Benjamin B. Ferencz - Biography

Biography

He was born in Transylvania, from where his family immigrated into the United States when he was ten months old. According to his own account, the family left Romania to evade the persecution of Hungarian Jews after Hungary had ceded the territory where they lived to Romania after World War I. The family settled in New York City, where they lived in the Lower East Side in Manhattan.

He studied crime prevention at the City College of New York and won a scholarship for the Harvard Law School with his criminal law exam. 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 was graduated from Harvard in 1943. After his studies, he joined the U.S. Army, where he served in the 115th AAA Gun Battalion, an anti-aircraft artillery unit. In 1945, he was transferred to the headquarters of General 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 this function, he was then sent to the concentration camps as they were liberated by the U.S. army.

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 in the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials in the legal team of Telford Taylor. Taylor appointed him Chief Prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen Case—Ferencz's first case. All of the 22 men on trial were convicted; 14 of them received death sentences, of which four were eventually carried out.

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:

"I once saw DPs beat an SS man and then strap him to the steel gurney of a crematorium. They slid him in the oven, turned on the heat and took him back out. Beat him again, and put him back in until he was burnt alive. I did nothing to stop it. I suppose I could have brandished my weapon or shot in the air, but I was not inclined to do so. Does that make me an accomplice to murder?"

"You know how I got witness statements?" "I'd go into a village where, say, an American pilot had parachuted and been beaten to death and line everyone one up against the wall. Then I'd say, 'Anyone who lies will be shot on the spot.' It never occurred to me that statements taken under duress would be invalid."

Ferencz stayed in Germany after the Nuremberg Trials, together with his wife Gertrude, whom he had married in New York on March 31, 1946. He participated in the setup of reparation and rehabilitation programs for the victims of persecutions by the Nazis, 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 1957, the family—they had four children by then—returned to the U.S., where Ferencz entered private law practice as a partner of Telford Taylor.

But the experiences made just after World War II left a defining impression on Ferencz. After thirteen years, and under the impression of the events of the Vietnam War, Ferencz left the private law practice and henceforth 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 published in 1975, entitled Defining International Aggression-The Search for World Peace, he argued for the establishment of such an international court. 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 entered in force. Under the Clinton administration, the U.S. did sign the treaty, but did not subsequently ratify it, and furthermore, under the administration of George W. Bush, "unsigned" the treaty and concluded a large number of bilateral agreements with other states that would exclude U.S. citizens from being brought before the ICC. Under the administration of Barack Obama, this policy was reversed.

Ferencz has repeatedly argued against this procedure and suggested that the U.S. simply join the ICC without reservations, as it was a long-established rule of law that "law must apply equally to everyone", also in an international context. In this vein, he has suggested in an interview given on August 25, 2006, that not only Saddam Hussein should be tried, but also George W. Bush because the Iraq War had been begun by the U.S. without permission by the UN Security Council.

In 2009, Ferencz was awarded the Erasmus Prize, together with Antonio Cassese; the award is given to individuals or institutions that have made notable contributions to European culture, society, or social science.

On May 3, 2011, two days after the death of Osama bin Laden was reported, Ferencz published a letter in the New York Times reminding readers that "illegal and unwarranted execution - even of suspected mass murderers - undermines democracy."

On March 16, 2012, Ferencz published a letter to the editor of the New York Times hailing the International Criminal Court's conviction of Thomas Lubanga as "a milestone in the evolution of international criminal law."