---
title: "Who was Ben Ferencz? Wiki, Bio, Age, Family, Cause of Death"
url: https://wikibioin.com/ben-ferencz-wiki/
description: "Ben Ferencz was only 27 years old when he managed to convict Nazi officers of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He later encouraged the establishment of an international tribunal"
published: 2023-04-10
updated: 2023-04-10
---

# Who was Ben Ferencz? Wiki, Bio, Age, Family, Cause of Death

Published 2023-04-10

April 10, 2023 [Ariana Willow](https://wikibioin.com/author/ariana-willow/) [Trending News](https://wikibioin.com/category/trending-news/) [0](https://wikibioin.com/ben-ferencz-wiki/#mh-comments)

Ben Ferencz

## Ben Ferencz Wiki – Ben Ferencz Biography

**Ben Ferencz** was only 27 years old when he managed to convict Nazi officers of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He later encouraged the establishment of an international tribunal to try war crimes, a goal achieved in 2002. Ferencz died silently on Friday night while sleeping in a Florida-sponsored nursing home in Boynton Beach.

The US Holocaust Museum confirmed his death and noted that the world had lost “a leader in the pursuit of justice for the victims of the Holocaust”. Ferencz was born in Transylvania, a region of Romania, in 1920. But when he was a young boy, his family fled to the United States to escape anti-Semitism and eventually settled in New York.

## Ben Ferencz Age

Ben Ferencz was 103 years old.

## Cause of Death

After earning a law degree from Harvard in 1943, he joined the US Army and participated in the Battle of the Bulge and the Allied landings in Normandy. Eventually, after rising to the rank of Sergeant, he joined a group tasked with investigating Nazi war crimes and gathering evidence.

Based in Germany with the army, the team would visit the concentration camps as they were released, note the conditions there, and talk to the survivors. Ferencz said he found victims “stacked like a thread tree” and found “desperate skeletons with diarrhea, dysentery, typhus, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and other ailments, gagging on their louse-filled bunk beds or on the floor, pitiful eyes only begging for help.”

One of the largest concentration camps in Germany, Buchenwald was described by him as “the burial home of indescribable horrors”. “There is no doubt that my experience as a war crimes investigator at Nazi execution sites has damaged me irreversibly. I continue to make an effort to keep the details to myself.

After the war, he returned to New York to pursue a career in law but was soon asked to help prosecute the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials, despite having no prior court experience. He was appointed attorney general in the case of members of the Einsatzgruppen, mobile SS death squads thought to have killed more than a million people while operating in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.

After the Second World War, charges were launched against 24 high-ranking Nazi officers. While three defendants were released, 19 defendants were found guilty. Twelve people were given the death penalty and ten were executed. Fluent in six languages, including German, Ferencz remained in West Germany after the trials were over and helped Jewish organizations get compensation payments from the new administration.

Later in his life, he became a professor of international law and advocated the establishment of an international court with the power to hear war crimes cases against heads of state. He has also written several books on the subject. The International Criminal Court was established in The Hague, Netherlands in 2002, but the involvement of a number of powerful countries, including the United States, hindered its effectiveness. Three girls and a boy survive Ferencz. In 2019, his childhood sweetheart and wife Gertrude Fried passed away.

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