Benjamin Ferencz, born in 1920 in Transylvania, resettled in the United States with his family while still an infant. He grew up in Manhattan and throughout his early years developed a yearning for world peace.

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1943 he joined the American army and served an anti-aircraft battalion, preparing for the invasion of France. Enlisted under General George Patton, Ferencz served in every campaign in Europe and witnessed the Nazi atrocities during the liberation of several camps. "Camps like Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Dachau are vividly imprinted in my mind's eye. Even today, when I close my eyes, I witness a deadly vision I can never forget-the crematoria aglow with the fire of burning flesh, the mounds of emaciated corpses stacked like cordwood waiting to be burned. . . . I had peered into Hell" (Planethood, Vision Books, 1988).

Discharged from the U.S. Army as a Sergeant of the Infantry in December 1945, Ferencz spent a short time in private practice in New York before he was recruited to serve on the prosecution of the subsequent trials at Nuremberg. When he arrived in Nuremberg in early 1946, the International Military Tribunal was already in session. He and about 50 other people concentrated on research in Berlin to uncover materials about professionals who had served the Nazi regime.

Telford Taylor, who took charge of the subsequent trials in late 1946, appointed Ferencz to be the chief prosecutor of the Einsatzgruppen case. The leaders of these mobile killing squads had been responsible for the murders of more than a million men, women, and children along the Russian-Polish border. Ferencz was 27 years old when he took charge of the case. All of his defendants were sentenced; 13 got the death penalty.

For Ferencz it has been clear. There must be international law that is respected and enforced if future atrocities and genocides are to be prevented. "Nuremberg," he exclaimed, "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 human race."

Ferencz stayed in Europe for a decade after Nuremberg to help victims of slave labor get restitution from the companies that had used slave labor. His book, Less Than Slaves, details the difficulties he faced in getting the companies to admit their crimes and provide compensation for the victims.

With a growing family, Ferencz finally returned to the United States and settled in New Rochelle, New York. For some time he practiced law in a private firm but by 1970 he had decided to devote his efforts to studying and writing about world peace. He has written not only scholarly legal treatises on the subject but also a handbook called Planethood that is designed for the average citizen to learn steps toward establishing international law and United Nations' reform.

In the 1990s his work was instrumental in the creation of the International Military Tribunal of the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He has also encouraged the growth and support of the International Criminal Court based on the Rome Statute in 1998.