25 Facts About Ben Ferencz

1.

Ben Ferencz 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.

2.

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

3.

When Ben 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.

4.

Ben 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.

5.

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

6.

Ben Ferencz returned to New York, but was recruited only a few weeks later to participate as a prosecutor on the legal team of Telford Taylor in the Subsequent Nuremberg trials.

7.

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

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8.

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

9.

Ben Ferencz repeatedly argued against this procedure and suggested that the US join the ICC without reservations, as it was a long-established rule of law that "law must apply equally to everyone", in an international context.

10.

Ben Ferencz suggested that Bush should be tried in the International Criminal Court for "269 war crime charges" related to the Iraq War.

11.

In 2013, Ben Ferencz again said that the "use of armed force to obtain a political goal should be condemned as an international and a national crime".

12.

Ben Ferencz wrote in 2018, in a preface to a book on the future of international justice, that "war-making itself is the supreme international crime against humanity and that it should be deterred by punishment universally, wherever and whenever offenders are apprehended".

13.

In 2009, Ben 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.

14.

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

15.

In 2018, Ben Ferencz was the subject of a documentary on his life, Prosecuting Evil, by director Barry Avrich, which was made available on Netflix.

16.

On January 16,2020, The New York Times printed Ben Ferencz's letter denouncing the assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, unnamed in the letter, as an "immoral action [and] a clear violation of national and international law".

17.

In March 2022, an audio clip of Ben Ferencz was played during the eleventh emergency special session of the United Nations General Assembly and he later gave an interview to BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

18.

Ben Ferencz said that Vladimir Putin should be "behind bars" for his war crimes, and that he was "heartbroken" over atrocities in Ukraine.

19.

In September 2022, Ben Ferencz appeared in the Ken Burns documentary The US and the Holocaust.

20.

In December 2022, Ben Ferencz was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.

21.

In January 2023, Ben Ferencz appeared in the David Wilkinson documentary Getting Away with Murder.

22.

In March 2023, in one of his last public appearances, Ben Ferencz presented a video clip of welcome to participants at The Nuremberg Principles: The Contemporary Challenges Conference, an event sponsored by the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America.

23.

In 1946, Ben Ferencz married his teenage girlfriend, Gertrude Fried, in New York.

24.

Ben Ferencz died at an assisted living facility in Boynton Beach, Florida, on April 7,2023, at the age of 103.

25.

Ben Ferencz was the last surviving prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.

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