Benjamin B. Ferencz

Benjamin B. Ferencz
Ferencz standing in the courtroom where the Nuremberg trials were held, 2012
Born	(1920-03-11) March 11, 1920 (age 97) Transylvania, Romania
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Harvard Law School City College of New York
Occupation	Lawyer

Benjamin Berell Ferencz (born March 11, 1920) is a Hungarian-born 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 twelve military trials held by the U.S. authorities at Nuremberg, Germany. Later, he became an advocate of the establishment of an international rule of law and of an International Criminal Court. From 1985 to 1996, he was Adjunct Professor of International Law at Pace University.

Ferencz was born in Transylvania, then part of Hungary, but a few months later ceded to Romania under the Treaty of Trianon (1920), the result of World War I. When he was ten months old his family emigrated to the United States, and according to his own account this was to evade the persecution of Hungarian Jews by the Romanians after they had gained control of Transylvania. 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 won a scholarship to Harvard Law School with his criminal law exam result. 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 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.