Ben Ferencz 1919 Leo R Sandy Ben Ferencz

Ben Ferencz 1919 - Leo R. Sandy

Ben Ferencz Benjamin Berell Ferencz 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, part of Romania. When he was ten months old his family emigrated to the United States, and according to his own account this was to avoid 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 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 115 th 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; 13 of them received death sentences, of which four were eventually carried out Ferencz stayed in Germany after the Nuremberg Trials, together with his wife Gertrude, whom he had married in New York on March 31, 1946 Together with Kurt May and others, 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 1956, 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 Experiences 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 court 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 established on July 1, 2002, when the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court came into force Under the Bush administration, the U. S. did sign the treaty, but did not ratify it

The administration of George W. Bush concluded a large number of bilateral agreements with other states that would exclude U. S. citizens from being brought before the ICC Ferencz has repeatedly argued against this procedure and suggested that the U. S. 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 2013, Ferencz stated once more that the "use of armed force to obtain a political goal should be condemned as an international and a national crime 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, The New York Times published a Ferencz letter which argued that "illegal and unwarranted execution - even of suspected mass murderers - undermines democracy

Also that year he presented a closing statement in the trial of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo in Uganda (Thomas Lubanga Dyilo is a convicted war criminal from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the first person ever convicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) On March 16, 2012, Ferencz, in another letter to the editor of The New York Times, hailed the International Criminal Court's conviction of Thomas Lubanga as "a milestone in the evolution of international criminal law In 2018, filmmaker Barry Avrich produced Prosecuting Evil, a feature length documentary on Ben Ferencz's life

On May 7, 2017, Ferencz was interviewed on CBS 60 Minutes On April 2017, the municipality of The Hague announced that the city will honor Benjamin Ferencz by naming the footpath next to the Peace Palace after him as "one of the figureheads of international justice": the Benjamin Ferenczpad (Benjamin Ferenczpath) The city's Deputy Mayor Saskia Bruines (International Affairs) travelled to Washington to symbolically present the street sign to Ferencz The street sign at the path next to the Peace Palace was unveiled by Ferencz, at the age of 97, and Deputy Mayor Bruines on 15 May 2017, together with a group of pupils of the local Duinoord School

Quotes 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? War makes murderers out of otherwise decent people. All wars and all decent people There can be no peace without justice, no justice without law and no meaningful law without a Court to decide what is just and lawful under any given

Quotes cont’d Well, if it's naive to want peace instead of war, let 'em make sure they say I'm naive. Because I want peace instead of war. If they tell me they want war instead of peace, I don't say they're naive, I say they're stupid. Stupid to an incredible degree to send young people out to kill other young people they don't even know, who never did anybody any harm, never harmed them. That is the current system. I am naive? That's insane Nuremberg taught me that creating a world of tolerance and compassion would be a long and arduous task. And I also 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

Quotes cont’d I don't think I'm an idealist. I'm a realist. And I see the progress. The progress has been remarkable. Look at the emancipation of woman in my lifetime. You're sitting here as a female. Look what's happened to the same-sex marriages. To tell somebody a man can become a woman, a woman can become a man, and a man can marry a man, they would have said, "You're crazy. " But it's a reality today. So the world is changing. And you shouldn't - you know - be despairing because it's never happened before. Nothing new ever happened before People get discouraged. They should remember, from me, it takes courage not to be discouraged

Videos The Greatest Trial The World Has Ever Seen | Ben Ferencz Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen Case #9 Opening PROSECUTING EVIL: THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF BEN FERENCZ Trailer | TIFF 2018

References PROSECUTING EVIL: THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF BEN FERENCZ Trailer | TIFF 2018. Retrieved from https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=me. Db. Zemxu. K 4 Ben Ferencz Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen Case #9 Opening. Retrieved from https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=b 67 B-Mo. KG_o The Greatest Trial The World Has Ever Seen | Ben Ferencz. Retrieved from https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=Zwa 4 z. RWDsv. I Ben Ferencz. Retrieved from https: //en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Ben_Ferencz

References cont’d Benjamin B. Ferencz Quotes. Retrieved from https: //www. azquotes. com/author/42086 Benjamin_B_Ferencz

Questions & Comments