Strangely enough, the death of a man who did a very important job seems to have gone unnoticed.
Born in March 1920 in what is now Romania, close to the frontiers of Hungary and Ukraine, Benjamin Ferencz soon found himself emigrating with his parents, to New York with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. They settled in New York City, and Ferencz changed his Yiddish name Berrel to Benjamin and studied in the New York school system. He did his undergraduate work at City College and then received a scholarship to Harvard Law School, a leading United States (U. S.) law school.
At the end of his law studies at Harvard, he was taken into the U. S. Army and in 1944, he was in Europe with the military justice branch or speciality of the United States Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps and Navy, the Judge-Advocate General Corps, responsible for administrative law, government contracting, civilian and military personnel law, the law of war and international relations, environmental law, etc.
On March 31, 1946 he married his teenage girlfriend Gertrude Fried in New York. Together with Kurt May and others, he participated in the setup of reparation and rehabilitation programs for the victims of Nazi persecution, and also had a part in the negotiations that led to the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany signed on September 10, 1952,
By conviction and interest, he began to collect information on the Nazi concentration camps. He was able to find photos, letters, and other material that he later was able to use as one of the prosecution team in the Nuremberg trials of Germans accused of war crimes. He was also a staff member of the Joint Restitution Successor Organization, various American and international Jewish organizations, concerned with the restoration or compensation of goods having belonged to Jewish families.
The JRSO founders were twelve of the largest Jewish organizations worldwide: American (American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Jewish Cultural Reconstruction), British (Anglo-Jewish Association, Board of Deputies of British Jews, Central British Fund, Council for the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Jews from Germany), French (Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France), Zionist (Agudas Israel World Organization, Jewish Agency for Palestine), an organisation representing the interests of the Jewish congregations in the American Zone (Interessenvertretung Israelitischer Kultusgemeinden in der US Zone) and an international organisation (World Jewish Congress).
After 1948 he developed close cooperation with the then recently created state of Israel. He also became a strong advocate of an international legal system such as the Tribunals on ex-Yugoslavia of 1993 and on Rwanda (1994).
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”.
Ferencz died at an assisted living facility in Boynton Beach, Florida, on April 7, 2023, at the age of 103. He was the last surviving prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.
Benjamin Ferencz leaves a heritage on which we can build. The development of world law is often slow and meets opposition. However, the need is great, and strong efforts at both national and international levels continue.
Some View on the World 