From Transylvania to Hell’s Kitchen
Benjamin Berell Ferencz was born on March 11, 1920, into a Jewish family in Nagysomkút, a small town in Transylvania. Within months of his birth the Treaty of Trianon transferred the region from Hungary to Romania, and the town became Șomcuta Mare. His older sister had been born in Hungary; he was born in Romania without anyone having moved. Ferencz later drew a lesson from that accident of borders: what mattered was not what a country was called but how it treated its people, and in his parents’ experience both states persecuted Jews.
When he was about ten months old the family emigrated to the United States to escape that persecution. They settled in New York, in a basement apartment in Manhattan’s rough Hell’s Kitchen district, where his father worked as a janitor and later as a house painter. Ferencz grew up poor in a tough neighbourhood.
City College and Harvard
A bright student, Ferencz studied crime prevention at the City College of New York. His result in a criminal-law examination won him a scholarship to Harvard Law School, where he studied under the legal philosopher Roscoe Pound and worked as a research assistant to the criminologist Sheldon Glueck, who was then writing a book on war crimes. It was Ferencz’s first encounter with the subject that would define his life.
He graduated from Harvard Law in 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, and immediately joined the US Army.
A soldier who could not type
The army made little use of its new Harvard lawyer. Ferencz began as a typist at Camp Davis in North Carolina, although he did not know how to type, and spent much of his time scrubbing pots and cleaning toilets. In 1944 he served with the 115th AAA Gun Battalion, an anti-aircraft artillery unit, and landed in Normandy shortly after D-Day. He fought through several of the major campaigns of the European war and was awarded five battle stars.
In 1945 he was transferred to the headquarters of General George S. Patton’s Third Army and assigned to a new war-crimes branch charged with gathering evidence. As the Allies advanced he entered concentration camps, among them Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg and Ebensee, often within days or hours of their liberation. He described ground covered with bodies, piles of bones near the crematoria and survivors in rags who could barely move. His task was to seize Nazi records before they could be destroyed. The experience marked him for life. He was candid, decades later, that the rules of that lawless moment were not those of a courtroom. In a 2005 interview with The Washington Post he recalled watching displaced persons beat an SS man and burn him alive in a crematorium oven without intervening, and admitted that he had sometimes taken witness statements under threat, never imagining that statements given under duress might be invalid. He never tried to hide it.
The reports in Berlin
Ferencz was honourably discharged at Christmas 1945 as a sergeant and returned to New York, where on March 31, 1946, he married his girlfriend, Gertrude Fried. Within weeks he was recruited to join the legal team of Telford Taylor, who was preparing the twelve subsequent Nuremberg trials that the United States conducted after the main tribunal against Göring and the other leading Nazis.
In 1946, working through captured files in Berlin, Ferencz and his team found a set of top-secret reports compiled by the Einsatzgruppen, the SS mobile killing units that had followed the German army into the Soviet Union. Day by day, unit by unit, the reports tallied the men, women and children they had shot. Ferencz began adding up the numbers; when he passed one million, he later recalled, he stopped counting. He flew to Nuremberg and urged Taylor to put the commanders on trial. Taylor hesitated because he was short of staff and money. Ferencz offered to take the case on top of his other duties, and Taylor agreed.
The biggest murder trial in history
On 29 September 1947, the 27-year-old Ferencz rose in the Nuremberg courtroom as chief prosecutor in the case of The United States of America v. Otto Ohlendorf et al. He was barely five feet two inches tall and had never tried a case before. It was, as the press and later historians called it, the biggest murder trial in history. Twenty-four SS officers had been indicted; one committed suicide and another was too ill to be tried, leaving twenty-two in the dock.
His opening statement began by speaking of sorrow and hope as the prosecution disclosed the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenceless men, women and children. Vengeance, he told the judges, was not the goal: the case was a plea of humanity to law. Relying almost entirely on the killers’ own reports and the defendants’ affidavits, the prosecution rested after two days without calling a single witness. All twenty-two defendants were convicted. More than a dozen were sentenced to death, though only four were eventually executed, in 1951; the other sentences were commuted. Ferencz never forgot that men who had murdered so many showed no real remorse. The lesson he took was that war can turn otherwise decent people into mass murderers.
Restitution for the survivors
Ferencz stayed in Germany after the trials. Working with colleagues such as Kurt May, he helped set up programmes to restore property and pay compensation to victims of Nazi persecution, and took part in the negotiations that produced the 1952 reparations agreement between West Germany and Israel and the first German restitution laws. He pursued claims on behalf of Jewish slave labourers against major German firms, and was struck by how often the perpetrators came to see themselves as the victims.
In 1956, with four children, the family returned to the United States, and Ferencz went into private practice as a partner of Telford Taylor. His 1979 book Less Than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation, an account of those efforts, won a National Jewish Book Award.
Law, not war
The Vietnam War convinced Ferencz that the work of Nuremberg was unfinished. After thirteen years in private practice he gave it up to campaign full time for a permanent international criminal court and for the outlawing of aggressive war itself. Beginning with Defining International Aggression in 1975, he wrote a series of books on world peace through law, and from 1985 to 1996 taught international law as an adjunct professor at Pace University. His slogan, repeated in books and countless interviews, was three words: law, not war.
When the Rome Statute came into force and the International Criminal Court was established in The Hague on July 1, 2002, it was the fulfilment of decades of his lobbying. He was openly critical when the United States declined to join, arguing that law must apply equally to everyone, including Americans. In 2011 he delivered a closing statement for the prosecution in the court’s first trial, of the Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga, and in 2012 he hailed Lubanga’s conviction as a milestone in international criminal law. He continued to insist that waging aggressive war should be treated as the supreme international crime.
The man
Ferencz was cheerful, blunt and tireless. He married Gertrude in 1946 and, he liked to say, they were together for seventy-three years without a quarrel until her death in 2019; they had four children. He gave much of what he had away. In 2016 he donated a million dollars to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s genocide prevention centre and pledged further gifts, and he said he intended to leave his life savings to the prevention of genocide.
His Jewishness was inseparable from his life’s work. His family had fled antisemitic persecution in Europe, he had walked through the camps where millions of Jews were murdered, and he spent years securing compensation for Jewish survivors. Yet his conclusion was universal: the crimes he prosecuted belonged to humanity, and the remedy was law that protected everyone, regardless of race or creed. His advice to young people was simple: never give up.
A century of witness
Ferencz remained a public voice into his hundreds. In 2009 he shared the Erasmus Prize with the Italian jurist Antonio Cassese, and in 2021 he became the first recipient of Liechtenstein’s Pahl Peace Prize. In 2017 The Hague named a footpath beside the Peace Palace the Benjamin Ferenczpad. Documentaries including Prosecuting Evil (2018) introduced him to new audiences. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 he said that Vladimir Putin belonged behind bars for war crimes and that he was heartbroken by the atrocities. That autumn he appeared in Ken Burns’s documentary series The U.S. and the Holocaust, and in December 2022 he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.
He died in Boynton Beach, Florida, on April 7, 2023, at the age of 103, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials. His legacy runs from a single courtroom in 1947 to the permanent institutions of international justice that exist today. The principle he fought to establish, that no one can treat human beings that way and escape accountability, is now written into international law.
Sources & further reading
Ben Ferencz, Wikipedia · Einsatzgruppen trial, Wikipedia · Opening statement of the prosecution, Einsatzgruppen case (NMT transcript), Mazal Library via phdn.org · Ben Ferencz (1920–2023): In His Own Words, USC Shoah Foundation · Ben Ferencz, former Nuremberg trials prosecutor, dies at 103, NBC News · The Biggest Murder Trial in History, benferencz.org · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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