Beyond the Einsatzgruppen Trial: Benjamin Ferencz’s Hidden Nuremberg History and Other Revelations in Gregory Gordon’s New Biog

The Centre for European, Comparative, and Constitutional Legal Studies (CECS) is pleased to invite all interested parties to the presentation of Professor Gregory Gordon’s new book, Nuremberg’s Citizen Prosecutor, which celebrates the life and legacy of Benjamin Ferencz, the Nuremberg Military Tribunal prosecutor who devoted his life to advancing international criminal justice.

The event will take place from 10:00-11:00 on 24 November in the Justitia meeting room (7A-2-04).

About the presentation

Beyond the Einsatzgruppen Trial: Benjamin Ferencz’s Hidden Nuremberg History and Other Revelations in Gregory Gordon’s New Biography

We know Benjamin Ferencz as the young prosecutor who brought the Einsatzgruppen death squad leaders to justice. But the full story of his transformative years in Nuremberg has never been told – until now.

Drawing from his definitive new biography, Nuremberg’s Citizen Prosecutor, Professor Gregory Gordon unveils a lost history that reconfigures our understanding of Ferencz’s legacy. The fruit of exhaustive, yearslong research, this talk will detail a central revelation: Ferencz’s service as an investigator and podium prosecutor for another Nuremberg trial. Professor Gordon will argue that this forgotten experience, and the work leading up to and following it, acted as the vital conceptual and experiential bridge between Ferencz's work on crimes against humanity and Holocaust reparations, and his later achievements as a leading advocate for criminalizing aggressive war.

The presentation will also explore other heretofore unknown milestones, including Ferencz’s work with philosopher Hannah Arendt, his behind-the-scenes role in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and his influence on victim reparations at the International Criminal Court. By presenting the key findings of Nuremberg’s Citizen Prosecutor, Professor Gordon will cast the life of one of the chief architects of international justice in an entirely new light.

About the author

Gregory S. Gordon is a Professor of Law at Peking University School of Transnational Law. Not long after earning undergraduate and law degrees from Berkeley, he served as an attorney at the ICTR on the landmark “Media” cases, the first international post-Nuremberg incitement prosecutions of media executives, earning a commendation from U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. He subsequently worked with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), serving, in sequence, as a street crime, white collar crime, organized crime and then human rights prosecutor (the latter for the Office of Special Investigations, the so-called “Nazi Hunters Unit”). He was detailed by DOJ to Sierra Leone to conduct a post-civil war justice assessment and served as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Professor Gordon is the author of Atrocity Speech Law: Foundation, Fragmentation, Fruition (Oxford University Press, 2017) and his new monograph Nuremberg’s Citizen Prosecutor: Benjamin Ferencz and the Birth of International Justice, is being published by the University of Virginia Press on 7 November 2025. He is pursuing a PhD at Stockholm University Faculty of Law proposing fixes to a broken justice framework for atrocity victims based on Ben Ferencz’s doctrinal and procedural innovations developed during his career. Since 2023, Professor Gordon has served as an advisor to Ukrainian prosecutors related to Russian war crimes arising from the invasion of Ukraine.

Registration

Everyone is welcome to join this seminar, but registration is needed, please registre here!  - No later than Sunday 23 November at 23:59