Dan Snow's History Hit - The Last Nuremberg Prosecutor

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

102 year old Ben Ferencz is the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials and a direct witness to the horrors of the Nazi death camps. Born in Transylvania he emigrated to the United States with his family as a child to escape antisemitic persecution. He trained at Harvard Law School, graduated in 1943 and served in the US army in the campaign to liberate western Europe. In 1945 at the end of the war, he was assigned to a team charged with collecting evidence of war crimes during which he visited the death camps and saw first-hand the appalling conditions there. He then became a prosecutor during the Nuremberg war crimes trials where his work focussed on the prosecution of the Einsatzgruppen death squads. His experiences during the war have led him to be a passionate, lifelong campaigner advocating for the international rule of law and he helped found the international criminal courts in The Hague. In this episode, he shares his life experiences and how we all need to find ways to resolve our differences peacefully if we want to continue to see humanity flourish.This interview was first released in 2021. If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Ben Ferencz is 102 years old. He is a national treasure, he's an international treasure. And I'm rebroadcasting his interview now. We recorded a couple of years ago, we thought the time, we had to really scramble to do it because he was, well, 100 years old, but he's now 102 and he's absolutely cruising. He's in great shape. He was just awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2023. He's back in the news and we wanted to share this extraordinary interview we did with him a while back. He's one of the most memorable interviewees I've ever had in this podcast. If you didn't hear it at the time, then you're in luck. If you did, well, you might want

to revisit it because he is the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials. Imagine that. He directly witnessed the horrors of the Nazi death camps. He had an extraordinary life. He was born in Transylvania. He escaped to the US, very lucky to escape in the 1930s, the US to avoid anti-Semitic persecution, the coming of the Holocaust. And he then, through extraordinary natural ability, hard work, ambition, he won a scholarship to Harvard Law School and ended up as a hugely important lawyer. Actually, during the Second World War, he served. He was in General Patton's Third Army, and he was tasked with noting down war crimes, investigating war crimes. And he actually visited concentration camps that

had been liberated by the US Army. So he had a hugely relevant experience of his time in the army. And in Christmas 1945, when they were looking to staff up for the Nuremberg trials, he was invited to participate as a prosecutor. His first case, the first case he ever prosecuted was 24 defendants, commanders of the Einsatzgruppen units, so units of the SS, that were death squads, execution squads, who went round Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe just murdering people. Millions of people, around two million people in fact. And young Ben French in his mid-twenties found himself prosecuting these men for crimes against humanity. As you'll hear, despite the extraordinary things he's seen, in fact. And young Ben French in his mid-twenties found himself prosecuting these men for crimes against humanity. As you'll hear, despite the extraordinary things he's seen, the great evil

that he's been exposed to, he's an optimist, he's an inspiration. And it gives me great pleasure to rebroadcast this interview I did with him a couple of years back. This is Ben French, 103 years old in March. Enjoy. This is Ben French, 103 years old in March. Enjoy. Ben, thank you very much for coming on. What are your memories of the end of those last few weeks and months of the war in Europe? No one has seen the horrors of war more closely than I have. No one. Because I came in as an enlisted man in the 115th AAA Gun Battalionalion assigned to shoot down enemy planes. Sometimes we did succeed in shooting down enemy planes.

Sometimes we shot down British and American planes. My next assignment was to go into the concentration camps as they were being liberated and collect evidence of crimes which might be brought before a court of law. In that capacity, I think I was the first American soldier to enter the concentration camps in Germany. Dead bodies all over the floor, crematorium going, sickness, disease everywhere. I saw that repeatedly, one camp after another. The impact that it's had on me has lasted to this very day. And I can't stop trying to change the world. I think that's been such a horrible experience done by people who are not monsters. On the

contrary, they thought themselves to be heroes defending their country against Bolshevism and the Jews. And I obtained a perspective on life and war itself. And I reached the conclusion the only rational way to deal with these problems

is to eliminate war making. Now, I'm perfectly aware that war making has been glorified for centuries, and nobody's going to turn it around in one human life. But if it's not turned around, and they continue this madness of putting billions of dollars into making weapons to kill more people, instead of using the money to care for legitimate complaints of people who could use it desperately if we continue to give preference to murder. And all of the wars are murder. Genocide is a word covered the killing of all groups of people. Every war is genocide. But if we don't change our perspective, goodbye, kids.

I've lived 102 years. It's not my life I'm concerned about. I'm concerned about you as young people like you who want to be patriots, who want to do the right thing, who don't quite understand why they're being sent to kill people they don't even know, maybe in countries they never even heard of. That's the current situation. So I welcome interviews like yours,

who hopefully will help change the public impression of what their duties are in connection with war and peace. You witnessed so much in those camps, including I was very struck by your account of the revenge of the former inmates, the former prisoners. Yes, I know what you're talking about. And so when I was the chief prosecutor in this biggest murder trial in history, I began with the sentence and vengeance is not our goal. Nor do we seek merely a just compensation. The case we present is a plea of humanity to law. I had in mind the murderous scene you have depicted.

The inmates in the camp, many of whom were still capable of doing so, caught a guard and they beat him up. The Americans had already occupied the camp. I was standing there with a rifle in my hand, and I asked myself, if I try to stop this, they're going to turn on me. So I didn't try to stop it. They beat him, and then they took him to the crematorium, which was still going. crematorium, piled up like cordwood, people who had been human before they were put into the concentration camp were now going to be burned. They put him into the crematorium, they warmed him up and took him out again, beat him up again, then put him in again, see if he was still alive, took him out again, beat him up again, spit him, hit him with sticks and so on, put him in again until he was finally well roasted and then took him out. I was watching this from a distance of maybe five feet,

10 feet away. And I didn't like what I saw. I was not cheering. Nobody was cheering. Some of the other inmates were saying, you know, give it to them. But there weren't too many like that. of the other inmates who were saying, you know, give it to them, but there weren't too many like that. And that's what you're talking about. So vengeance is not my goal. Vengeance begets more vengeance. And all the time, we must seek justice, not vengeance. And justice under these circumstances is hard to come by. One way of doing it is to advertise the facts, the truth to the public in the hope that there'll be enough of you who understand that and join in my crusade to change the way the hearts and minds of people work when it comes to killing in the name of your national heroism. Ben, just remind, how old were you when you liberated the camps? And how did you end up prosecuting these war criminals? I was 27 years old. It was my first case.

How did you get the job? Well, I was the best man in the world for that job. I had always been interested in crime prevention, having been raised as a poor immigrant in the United States coming from Romania. It seemed to me that a career in crime prevention, particularly juvenile crime, would be a worthwhile career. With that knowledge, the Harvard Law School gave me a full scholarship. I graduated from Harvard. I had done research for a professor who was doing a book on war crimes. So I knew all about the history of war crimes and what the plans were after the war, bringing the Nazi criminals to justice. And when we did finally reach the point where we could

enter the concentration camps, capture some of the murderers, and after the war where we could enter the concentration camps, capture some of the murderers. And after the war, we could select the murderers from 3,000 men who every day, every day, murdered hundreds of thousands of people. And I had to select 22 because we only had 22 seats in the dock when we tried guring and leading Nazis. So you had 3,000 men in these Einsatzgruppen as they were called, disguised their purpose. Einsatz meant action, action groups. I had to select 22. I selected those of the highest rank and best education. I had six or so generals in

the dock, no enlisted men in the dock, and many of my defendants had doctor degrees, some had double doctor degrees. So this was an action directed at the people who planned and carried out these horror crimes. And I've been pursuing the same goals ever since. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking to the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials, Ben Ferencz. More coming up. the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. As all this was going on,

did you feel like these criminal cases might stop terrible things like this happening again in the future? Oh, absolutely. The only way of deterring these crimes is to point out to people that failure to do so is going to result in what happened in the war. Cities were destroyed, houses completely demolished, regardless of who the owners were. So our primary goal was a deterrence. And for that, we had to change the hearts and minds of people. Because if people feel that these are the enemies,

we must kill them in order to protect ourselves, we're never going to make any progress. So you've got to point to the horrors of war itself. Every war is horror. Ben, did you hate these men? I did not hate them. If I hated them, perhaps I would have been cheering when they were executed. I recognised early on that war can make criminals,

mass murderers, out of otherwise decent people. And the defendants, because they had been so selective, were a good sample of people who were kind to their cats and dogs, but to their parents, their children, I don't know what, who otherwise were perfectly normal people. So to just hate them gets me nowhere. And you can't hate a whole people as we do when we declare war on a country. We don't think of holding accountable the persons who committed the crimes. Crimes are committed by people, not by organizations or nations. And I was fully aware of that at all times.

My hatred was against the hatred which was being fermented in the country, not against the individuals, many of whom were themselves victims. Was it hard to amass evidence, or was it easy to link individuals to these monstrous crimes? It was so easy, it was hard to believe. I'm talking now about the Einsatzgruppen, the special murder squads. I went into the camp as quickly as it was being liberated by the American army. I'd find the officer in charge. I'd say, I want 10 men immediately. I'm here on orders with General Patton conducting investigations

on behalf of the United States. Nobody goes in or out without my permission. They'd say, yes, sir, give me 10 men. I take over the office where the records were kept. Then the Germans were so sure that they would never be called to account that they had a top secret report of who killed how many people in which town. And then they totaled them up and sent them off to Berlin, to the Gestapo headquarters, where they were consolidated from groups A, B, C, and D. There were four such groups, subgroups, and they distributed the list to 99 people who were listed on the distribution list. I sat at a little scribe machine in my office, and I just began counting the count. When I reached a

million people murdered, I stopped. I said, that's enough. My job had been to collect evidence for other trials. I took off from Berlin, flew down to Nuremberg. I spoke there to the man who had been in charge of creating the subsequent trials, General Telfer Taylor. Later, we were law partners in New York. And I said, you've got to put on a new trial.. Later, we were law partners in New York. And I said, you've got to put on a new trial. He said, we can't. The trials have already all been assigned. The lawyers are already doing their work.

The Pentagon isn't so keen on extending these to begin with. I'll never get approval for that. I said, you can't let these guys go. I have here mass murder, never done in history. You can't let these bastards go. He said, well, can you do it in addition to your other work? I said, sure. He said, okay, you do it.

I had never tried a case before. I had never been in a court before. But I knew the subject because I had done the research for a book on war crimes by a Harvard professor who made a big thing of it. And I was not blind to what I was seeing. What about remorse? Did they try and justify their actions? Did they even try and defend themselves?

Everybody was there. It was at his grandmother's funeral. Every baloney thing. Not a word, never a word saying, I'm sorry. That was the thing which pained me the most. For the years that I was in Germany and I had four children born in Nuremberg, they never said, oh, sorry.

No remorse whatsoever. They felt this was their patriotic duty. This was a victor's justice. And there was no change in sentiment as far as I could see. I can't help asking, how did you cope? How have you been able to enjoy life, have relationships, family, kids? How have you protected your mental health? Well, first of all, the children came later after the trials were already underway. So I wasn't

thinking of them. To call them monstrous crimes, and they are monstrous crimes. And I see in a radio and TV broadcast, the question was put to me, how could you deal with these monsters? I said, was the man who dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima a monster? And the answer is no. It was the President of the United States who ordered the bomb dropped. If you feel that what you're doing is your national interest, these mass murderers told me, the chief defendant, Major General of the SS, Dr. Otto Ohlendorf, explained to me, I talked to him man to man in

the death house in Nuremberg. he said, Hitler knew that the Russians planned to attack us. I couldn't challenge Hitler's knowledge, it was greater than mine. And so it was our duty to preempt the Russians by attacking first. And that was allowed under the still existing rules in the Pentagon, that if you have to prevent something by pre-empting the strike, you can do that. It's not illegal. And this was the defence used by some of my leading doctor-educated defendants. And they felt no guilt at all. They felt, on the contrary, they were being persecuted rather than prosecuted. And they expressed no regrets for anybody or anything. How have you responded? How have the things that you've seen changed you?

I have tried to change the world. Now, you may think I'm out of my mind, and you may be right, but I have never been able to settle down to anything which didn't relate to eliminating war in the long run. I'm aware of the fact that I cannot expect it to happen in one human lifetime. And so I look to the young people and the children to carry on where I had to leave off. But we had things to do. If you had a dispute with the country, you don't go out and kill innocent people who have nothing to do with it. You go to court, but you need a criminal court too to deter the crime. And so I spent many, many years in helping to create an international criminal court, which now exists in The Hague. And as a tribute to my past, I was invited to make a closing statement for the prosecution in their first case. So I thank them for the honor. And I see the growth. I'm opposing anybody who thinks we don't need a

court. And that was unfortunately the top position taken by the White House in recent years. And some people like the spokesman for the Pentagon have been saying, we don't need a court. We have American courts. We can take care of it ourselves. You can't take care of it yourself. You need an international court. So I spent much time working on that and trying to define aggression. And I wrote a lot of books and I lectured in a lot of places.

And I did a lot of things. And I'm too busy to die. I'm too busy still waiting for people to make more progress than I was able to do in one human life. You're now 102 years old. You've seen so much. There is obviously so much left to do. Are you feeling optimistic? Well, the world's in bad shape, but i feeling optimistic yes i am feeling optimistic i say

i'm realistic we have made progress when i was going to school there was no such thing as human rights law today it's taught in most law schools in the world no such thing in universal declaration of human rights these things are growing slowly, but they're there. They're functioning despite great difficulties in catching the defendants, collecting evidence against them when the governments themselves are involved in approving or committing the crimes. So they have a tough job. And I know the prosecutors. I spent a lot of time with them. They're good people. They're trying very hard. They are making as much progress as conceivable or possible under the current circumstances. We have a long way to go. We won't do this overnight. And I hope

we won't wait until we get hit with a nuclear bomb or with cyberspace weapons now, nuclear bombs are obsolete. We get cyberspace weapons wiping out cities. We have that capacity now. The United States has it. I don't know whether England has it. Russia has it. China has it. I don't know who else has it. I'm assuming other countries. So the world is much more dangerous than it's ever been for the young people, not for me. And when you begin to recognize that, you say, heck, isn't there a better way to settle disputes about our boundaries or our membership in other organizations?

You haven't got a court. You've got nothing. You have only force. So you have to have a court or some method of arbitration of doing it by peaceful means, as the UN Charter demands. You can settle your disputes only by non-forceful means. Do it. How many times do you have to have a UN built? Because how many millions and millions of people will be killed first before we make progress? of people we kill first before we make progress. So my appeal is to the young people, don't give up. Never give up. Those are the three pieces of advice I give them all.

And don't be discouraged. It takes courage not to be discouraged. So show your courage and say to those who have power today, hey, guys, get off it. You have a difference of opinion, settle it without killing me and my mother and my grandfather and everybody else. Thank you so much. Quickly, tell me what your wonderful

and wise book is called. I have written many books. This is a little one. It's called Parting Words, Nine Lessons for a Remarkable Life. Before you go, Ben, just one more little question. You've given us one piece of advice, never ever give up, and I'm doing my best to follow that advice. But give us one more, one more piece of advice. Settle all your disputes without the use of force.

Well, that's certainly advice we should all heed. Thank you very much, Ben Ferencz. Thank you for this interview, and thank you for devoting your whole life trying to make this world a better place. You're welcome.