Audio: War (Crimes) and Peace

Ben Ferencz was 27 when he became the chief prosecutor of one of the biggest murder trials in history: the Einsatzgruppen Case, part of the second wave of trials at Nuremberg in the years after the Second World War.

He won convictions of all 22 defendants by painstakingly documenting the atrocities that resulted in the deaths of over a million men, women, and children at the hands of German troops on the eastern front. Not bad for the first case of his career.

Ferencz came back home and built a successful practice—then gave it up in the late 1960s when a colleague returned from Vietnam and said that the United States "forgot what we tried to teach the world at Nuremberg." Since then, he's been a passionate advocate for international law and for peace, working to establish the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Now, at 96, Ferencz has a new goal: to make wars of aggression a crime against humanity.

To advance this work, Ferencz last year became a supporter of Harvard Divinity School's new initiative on Religions and the Practice of Peace (RPP). He spoke recently to HDS by telephone about his career, the need for institutions that support global peace, and his gift to RPP.