Criminal - Palace of Justice – A Conversation with Benjamin Ferencz

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

When Benjamin Ferencz was 27 years old, he prosecuted his very first trial. It's been called the largest murder trial in history, with more than one million victims. There were 22 defendants, each of them high-ranking members of Nazi Germany’s death squad. Benjamin Ferencz died last Friday, April 7, at the age of 103. He was the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials. Today, we're sharing our conversation from 2018. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast.  We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Last Friday, on April 7th, Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, died in Florida at 103.

In announcing his death, his son Donald wrote, This is not a guy who went fishing or played golf. This is a guy whose life mission was to try to make it a better world. We first interviewed Benjamin Ferencz in 2018. Today, in remembrance of his life and work, we're bringing you that conversation again. Greetings to you all. My name is Benjamin Ferencz, and I'm being interviewed in Delray Beach, Florida, with a request to give you an outline of what I've been doing with my life and some things which may be of interest and hopefully will lead to a more humane and better world.

I met Benjamin Ferencz at his home. We sat side by side in two computer chairs at his desk. And if I had any idea that I was going to be the one leading the conversation, I quickly learned I was wrong. Where did I get these peculiar ideas? Well, I was born 99 years ago in a little village in Transylvania. Now, I know that most of you have never heard of Transylvania, although you have some connection with my uncle Dracula. Of course, there is no such uncle, but there was a Transylvania. Everything about him seems much younger than his 99 years. Part of that might be because of his morning routine. I wake up usually about 7 o'clock in the morning.

The first thing I do is a physical routine before I get out of bed. I raise my feet and I wiggle my toes and I turn my legs around in circles and do that for quite a bit. And then I do 25 sit-ups in bed. Then I get out of bed, right? Then after some toiletries, I go to another room. I breathe the air, open the door, take deep breathing, 25 times in and out while I bend over

and do other things, waving my hands around. Then I do the world famous, world famous, 125 push-ups. And then, of course, I go swimming. I've never met anybody like him. He has a wild sense of humor that I wasn't expecting from someone who's had such a serious career. Benjamin Ferencz is the last surviving prosecutor of what's been called the largest murder trial in history, a trial with more than a million victims. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. My sister was born in the same bed that I was born in half earlier.

And the one thing we had in common with whatever was called Hungary or Romania was that they persecuted the Jews and there were no work for them. So my parents decided, after they had two little babies, to take up the babies and look for a better place to live. We sailed away on a ship across the Atlantic to New York in December of 1921. We traveled third class because there was no fourth class. We arrived in New York, Harvard with no money, no friends, no language, no skills. Let me skip along because it's been a long life. Benjamin Friends was admitted to a New York City high school for gifted students and went on to enter Harvard Law School.

Then the war broke out while I was in school. Japan attacked the United States. Everybody that I knew went down to enlist. I went too. He wanted to work in intelligence, but he wasn't eligible because he was an immigrant. His second choice was to become an Air Force pilot, but he was rejected because they said he wasn't tall enough. So he enlisted in the Army and was assigned to the 115th AAA Gun Battalion. He landed on the Normandy beaches and in the coming months fought in most of the major battles in World War II,

Normandy, the Siegfried Line, Final Battle of the Bulge. And then, because he'd done a lot of research on war crimes in law school, he was assigned to work on the newly forming U.S. War Crimes Branch. Will you explain to me what a war crime is? A war crime, technically, is simply a violation of the rules of warfare, which have been agreed to in a number of treaties, most of them signed in The Hague under sponsorship of the Swiss government. For example, we've had war crimes beginning since war began.

Wars began with little David hitting Goliath in the head with a rock. Well, times have changed. When the Germans began dropping poison gas into the trenches in World War I and they were dying a horrible death, the world came together with the first Hague Conventions saying some things you cannot do in a war. You cannot shoot your enemy in the back. You refuse to take prisoners.

You cannot use poison gas. Trying to make war more humane. That is absurd. Absolutely absurd. I can assure any of your listeners that when a war is on, the war crimes rules that are laid down in a war are forgotten. Your problem is you kill the other guy before he kills you. Most of the cases he investigated involved German soldiers killing American prisoners.

He says he sometimes had to dig up bodies of American pilots who'd been shot down and beaten to death. He would write a report describing the crime, listing suspects, and naming which laws of war had been violated. And then, his assignment changed. We'll be right back. To be continued... A seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts.

We begin getting reports that there are people coming out of what looked like war camps, and they're all dressed in something that looks like pajamas, and they all look like they're dying, they're skinny. The first concentration camp Benjamin Frenz was ordered to visit was one of the largest, Buchenwald. An estimated 56,000 prisoners were killed there before it was liberated in 1945. Concentration camps were being liberated one after another, and Benjamin Friends was assigned to get to them and collect as much evidence as possible,

as quickly as possible. He was looking for official camp records, registries of who had been killed, and which German guards and officers had done the killing. How many camps did you actually go to to take reports? There must have been about ten camps. I didn't count them. I moved as fast as I could from one camp to another.

Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenburg, Gorisch-Gerau, a whole series of camps. As fast as I could get, the front was moving forward rapidly, and I was following the front. I was getting reports from headquarters as to where the action was. And I would seize all the records in the camp. I would go to the camp commander, the German who was in charge, and the American who was in charge,

and I'd say, I'm here on orders of the President of the United. And I want 10 men immediately surround the Schreibstube, which is the office where the records are. Nobody was in or out without my permission. And I'd seize then the record keeping office where they kept records. The Germans, God bless them, are very careful. When they murder somebody, they keep a list. First, they want to know his name. They want to know how old he is, where he came from. And I had the Totenbürste. The Totenbürste were the death registries of how many people were killed. One of the inmates, he grabbed me when I came in. He hugged me, and he said, I've been waiting for you. I have difficulty recalling these stories because I'm still emotionally affected with what I saw. And he led me to a place near the barbed wire,

electrified wire around the camp. He had a shovel with him, and he dug up a little wooden box. Inside the box were identity cards, little booklets like a passport that German soldiers would have stamped whenever they came and went. When this little passport book was filled, they got another one. He was supposed to destroy the old one. He didn't.

He kept them. Now, every time he did that, he took his life into his hands. They would have shot him dead on the spot if they had seen what he was doing. And he held them. And those were, then he buried them in a box, waiting for the liberation day. That, of course, was an invaluable piece of evidence as to who was in the camp at what time. What were you thinking after seeing all the things that you had seen? I was not thinking.

I shut off my brain. I said, this is not real. These are not human beings. These are victims here, and I can't stop and think. Just get your job done. Get your job done. Get your job done. Get the hell out of here. There was disease, remp, and dysentery, diarrhea, rats, filth.

And get out. And get out and write your report. And I wrote my reports. First chance I got, you know, and with all the information. Who was in the camp? Who were the commanders? How many people were there. It was necessary. When he visited the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria, he described in a letter that prisoners were so frail, many were being carried like babies to a field hospital. He wrote,

no one who has not seen it can visualize the scene. The inmates caught one of the guards, and they beat him up. I was there when they caught him, when they beat him. They then took him to the crematorium and put him in, alive. They strapped him to the gurney, which is what they used, metal gurney to slide the bodies into the oven. They put him in, started to cook him, and they pulled him out. He was still alive. They beat him up again, and then they put him in again, and they cooked him slowly. These were the prisoners who were killing the gods. Vengeance.

That's an inevitable outcome. Did I try to stop it? I did not. Could I have stopped it? Probably not. Do I remember it? I do. What's the next question?

On the day after Christmas in 1945, he was discharged with the rank of sergeant. He went back to New York, got married to his longtime girlfriend, Gertrude, and planned to practice law. At the same time, a trial was beginning in Germany. Leaders of the Nazi party were being prosecuted by an international military tribunal. The trial was taking place in a town called Nuremberg, at the Palace of Justice. This was the first Nuremberg trial. Nothing like it had ever been done before. It was controversial. The guilt of the defendants wasn't really in question, so some wondered about the trial's legitimacy.

But the American chief prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, said it was important to create a detailed record of what had happened under Hitler's regime. He said that if a record was not made, quote, future generations would not believe how horrible the truth was. And Benjamin Frenz was sent to Berlin to search Nazi offices and archives for evidence of crimes committed not only by Nazi leaders, but also doctors, lawyers, and businessmen. So we want to put the doctors on trial for medical experiments. We want to put the lawyers on for perverting the law. We want to put the SS on for mass murder. We want to put the foreign ministers on trial for trying to hoodwink the rest of the law. We want to put the SS on for mass murder. We want to put the foreign ministers on trial for

trying to hoodwink the rest of the world. We want to explain how it was that a civilized country like Germany could allow these things to happen and to make them happen and to do the things which they did. Over the course of his research in Berlin, he identified another group he thought should be tried, the Einsatzgruppen. The word Einsatz means action. Gruppen is groups. And these action groups were assigned to kill without pity or remorse every single Jewish man, woman, or child they could lay their hands on, and to do the same with gypsies and anybody else who might be a suspected potential enemy of the Reich. And there were 3,000 men divided into groups A, B, C, and D.

I came upon reports of these Einsatzgruppen, daily reports, top secret, sent from the front to Berlin where they were consolidated, and sent out. And I had a distribution list of 99 people who later said I didn't know anything about it. And they reported faithfully who was the commander in charge, how many Jews they killed, in which town.

And I had a little adding machine. I added them up when I reached a million. Over a million people murdered by these groups. I said, we have to put out a new trial. Benjamin Ferencz flew the records to Nuremberg and showed them to the chief prosecutor and asked for an additional trial. He said, no, we can't. The Pentagon has approved the budget.

We cannot expect any additional trials because there's a lot of opposition to it as well. And all the lawyers are assigned. The other trials are already started. And I said, you cannot let these million murderers get go. This is the biggest murder trial in history. You cannot just simply say because we run out of space or money, you can't let them go. And he said, well, can you do it in addition to your other work, supervising the search for documents? I said, sure. He said, okay, you're it. So I became the chief

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psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. Benjamin Friends was assigned to be the chief prosecutor for the Einsatzgruppen case. He was only 27 years old, and he had never tried a case before. He says he'd never even been to court. There were 22 defendants, members of these special so-called action groups. I said, look, I don't want to talk to these defendants. I had researchers who spoke German, German refugees. I want you to go down, interrogate this guy. I want to know everything about him from the moment he was born. You get all the information back to me.

But I didn't want to talk to any of them. I said, I'll see them in courtroom. And I didn't want to set up any human connection because I had picked the defendants, and I had picked them out of a list of 3,000. We had the roster. All of them were high-ranking. I had six generals, something like that.

I don't remember the count. And I selected them. How did you, why did you select those that were higher rank? Because responsibility begins at the top. It doesn't begin at the bottom. Lothar Sendler, how do you plead to this indictment? Guilty or not guilty? Nicht schuldig.

Walter, bist du schuldig? Find Schubert. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty? Nicht schuldig. Heinz Schubert. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty? Nicht schuldig. We are now ready to hear the presentation by the prosecution. Here's Benjamin Frenz. This was a tragic fulfillment of a program of intolerance and arrogance. Vengeance is not our goal,

nor do we seek merely a just retribution. We ask this court to affirm by international penal action man's right to live in peace and dignity, regardless of his race or creed. The case we present is a plea of humanity to law. And I didn't ask for the death penalty. I gave it very deep thought, what am I going to ask for? You got these 22 guys there.

They have murdered over a million people. There's no question about their guilt. Should you chop them up into a million pieces and feed them to the dogs? I said, that would be ridiculous. Just hang them, shoot them, take them out and have a public display? I said, no, it would be ridiculous too. I said, if it's going to have any meaning to this trial, we have to be aware first that the victims were slaughtered because they didn't share the race, the religion,

or the ideology of their executioners. I said, if I could turn that around and make it a crime to kill somebody because he doesn't share your race, your color, or your political persuasion, if you can get that a crime against humanity, if you can get that out, then you will protect future generations at least to some extent, and it would be worthwhile and more meaningful than what you do with these 22 murderers. The 22 defendants were found guilty of membership in a criminal organization, war crimes, and of committing crimes against humanity.

14 of the 22 were sentenced to death. My personal reaction was very somber. I didn't say, hooray, good for you. On the contrary, I got a splitting headache. Every time he said, tribunal sentenced you to death by hanging, boom. It was like a hammer hitting me in the head. This tribunal sentence you to death by hanging. Next, death by hanging, death by hanging, death by hanging. I thought my head was going to bust. And in fact, we had planned, as was customary, when the trial came to an end, the chief prosecutor had a party for his staff, and I had planned a party for my staff. And I couldn't go to my own party.

I called homeless B in my house, and I said, I'm going to bed. And so it was not one of joy or victory. It was a very somber experience, I would say. After the trial, he and his wife Gertrude stayed in Germany. They had four children, all born in Nuremberg. He worked on restitution and reparations efforts and helped return property to Holocaust survivors. If you do somebody a harm, wrongful harm, you have an obligation to try to

make good by either compensating him or trying to repair the damage done. That was the guiding principle, a very simple principle of justice. And with that and with no experience whatsoever in doing such a thing, it had never happened after a war that the victor or the defeated has to pay off the victor, they had reparations which never worked but individual compensation never had been tried before and I said we do it now. Then after that of course after you've stopped the war, punished the criminals, set up compensation for the victims. The next step, the most important, prevent it from happening again. And that's what I've been doing ever since.

In 1956, he returned to the United States with his family to begin a career in private law practice. And he started writing about international law and speaking about his experiences at Nuremberg. His ideas were instrumental in the development of the International Criminal Court at The Hague. He gave the closing statement in the court's first case against the Congolese warlord. He's still working today at 99. I asked him about retirement, and he said he has no desire to play golf. And you care for your wife. Of course. That's primary obligation number one,

because we have the world record there, I'm sure. My wife, I married an older woman. She's about five months older than me. And we have been happily married since 1946. How many years is that? 72. It's 72 years. We never had a quarrel. That's pretty damn good. How is that possible? It's very possible. First of all, I'm not suggesting we didn't have differences of opinion,

but we never raised our voice, we never shouted, we never pounded the table, because it's mutual respect and caring for each other. They have a funny word for it that I don't like, love. I don't like the word because you can love a piece of cheese, you can love to piece of cheese, you can love to eat a lovely day, you know, I can love to go home, I love to finish this interview. And I say, if you say caring for somebody,

that reflects better. And my wife now needs my care. It's a take-home pay, you know. It's just payback time. In 2016, Benjamin Ferencz quietly donated a million dollars to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. The footpath next to the Peace Palace at The Hague was named after him. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.

Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our technical director is Rob Byers. Engineering by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. We'll be right back. Difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Don't receive Botox cosmetic if you have a skin infection.

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