Sackler lecture to be given by Nuremberg prosecutor

Benjamin Ferencz, a distinguished legal scholar who was a young prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials for Nazi war crimes after World War II, will deliver the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lecture in Human Rights titled “The Lessons of Nuremberg for Today and Tomorrow,” on Monday, Nov. 7, at 7:30 p.m. in Konover Auditorium.

The lecture is part of a series of events celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.

Ferencz is chairman of the Commission on an International Criminal Court of the World Association of Lawyers, an accredited non-governmental observer at the United Nations.

Now in his 80s, Ferencz remains an impassioned advocate for human rights and global peace, who devotes his time and energy to the daunting mission of changing society’s glorification of war to a reverence for peace. He is professor emeritus of international law at Pace Law School in White Plains, N.Y., where he taught a course on “The International Law of Peace,” and founded the Pace Peace Center.

Just 10 months old when his family moved to the United States, Ferencz was raised in New York and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1943. Immediately after graduation, he served in the military during World War II. He fought in every campaign in Europe and joined in the liberation of German concentration camps. As Nazi atrocities were uncovered, he was transferred to a newly created War Crime Branch of the Army to gather evidence of Nazi brutality and to arrest the criminals.

In 1945, Ferencz was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army and returned to New York prepared to practice law. But at the age of 27 he was appointed as a Chief Prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg war crimes trials against the SS extermination squads that had been responsible for the murder of millions of European Jews.