Benjamin B . Ferencz Benjamin Berell Ferencz ( born March 11 , 1920 ) is a Hungarian - born American lawyer . He was an investigator of Nazi war crime s 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 a vocal 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 . Biography . He was born in Transylvania , in the Kingdom of Hungary , from where his family immigrated into the United States when he was ten months old . According to his own account , the family left Romania to evade the persecution of Hungarian Jews after Transylvania was ceded from Hungary to Romania by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon after World War I . The family settled in New York City , where they lived in the Lower East Side in Manhattan . He studied crime prevention at the City College of New York and won a scholarship for the Harvard Law School with his criminal law exam . 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 camp s 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 ; 14 of them received death sentences , of which four were eventually carried out . In a 2005 interview for the Washington Post he revealed some of his activities during his period in Germany by way of showing how different military legal norms were at the time : Ferencz stayed in Germany after the Nuremberg Trials , together with his wife Gertrude , whom he had married in New York on March 31 , 1946 . 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 1957 , 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 . But the experiences made 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 instance for issues of crimes against humanity and war crime s . 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 indeed established on July 1 , 2002 , when the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court entered in force . Under the Clinton administration , the U . S . did sign the treaty , but did not subsequently 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 . simply 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 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 , Ferencz published a letter in the New York Times reminding readers that " illegal and unwarranted execution - even of suspected mass murderers - undermines democracy . " On March 16 , 2012 , Ferencz published a letter to the editor of the New York Times hailing the International Criminal Court ' s conviction of Thomas Lubanga as " a milestone in the evolution of international criminal law . "