00:00:01
Greetings to you all. Uh my name is Benjamin Ferencz and I'm being interviewed uh in Delray Beach, Florida
00:00:10
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
00:00:18
hopefully will lead to a more humane and better world. I met Benjamin Ferencz at his home. We
00:00:24
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
00:00:31
conversation, I quickly learned I was wrong. Where did I get these peculiar ideas?
00:00:37
Well, I was born 99 years ago in a little village in Transylvania. Now, I know that most of you've never
00:00:46
heard of Transylvania, although you have some connection with my Uncle Dracula. Of course, there is no such uncle, but
00:00:53
there was a Transylvania. Everything about him seems much younger than his 99 years. Part of that might be
00:01:01
because of his morning routine. Well, I wake up usually about 7:00 in the morning. The first thing I do is a
00:01:08
physical routine while before I get out of bed. I raise my feet and I wiggle my toes and I
00:01:17
turn my legs around in circles and do that for quite a bit. And then I do uh 25 situps in bed. Uh then I get out
00:01:27
of bed, right? Then after some toiletries, I go to another room. I breathe the air, open
00:01:35
the door, take deep breathing 25 times in and out while I bend over and do other things, wave with my hands around.
00:01:42
Then I do the world famous world famous 125 pushups. And then of course, I go swimming.
00:01:54
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
00:02:00
serious career. Benjamin Ferencz is the last surviving prosecutor of what's been called the
00:02:08
largest murder trial in history. A trial with more than a million victims. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
00:02:17
[Music] My sister was born in the same bed that I was born a year and a half earlier.
00:02:32
And the one thing we had in common with it, whatever it was called Hungary or Romania, was that they persecuted the
00:02:39
Jews and there were no work for them. So, my parents decided after they had two little babies
00:02:47
to take up the babies and look for a better place to live. We sailed away on a ship across the
00:02:55
Atlantic to New York in December of 1921. We traveled third class because there was no fourth class. Uh
00:03:05
we arrived in New York Harbor with no money, no friends, no language, no skills.
00:03:12
Let me skip along because it's been a long life. Benjamin Ferencz was admitted to a New
00:03:18
York City high school for gifted students and went on to enter Harvard Law School. Then the war broke out while
00:03:24
I was in school. Japan attacked the United States. Everybody that I knew went down to enlist. I went too.
00:03:32
He wanted to work in intelligence, but he wasn't eligible because he was an immigrant. His second choice was to
00:03:39
become an Air Force pilot, but he was rejected because they said he wasn't tall enough.
00:03:45
So, he enlisted in the army and was assigned to the 115th AAA Gun Battalion. He landed on the Normandy beaches and in
00:03:54
the coming months fought in most of the major battles in World War II, Normandy,
00:04:00
the Siegfried Line, Final Battle of the Bulge. And then, because he'd done a lot of
00:04:05
research on war crimes in law school, he was assigned to work on the newly forming US War Crimes Branch.
00:04:13
Will you explain to me what a war crime is? A war crime, technically, is simply uh a violation of the rules of warfare
00:04:23
which have been agreed to in a number of treaties, most of them signed in The Hague under sponsorship of the Swiss
00:04:29
government. For example, uh we've had war crimes beginning since war began. War began with little David hitting
00:04:37
Goliath in the head with a rock. Well, times have changed. When we began when the Germans began dropping poison gas
00:04:44
into the trenches in World War the world came together with the first Hague Conventions saying
00:04:54
some things you cannot do in a war. You cannot shoot your enemy in the back. You
00:04:58
cannot you refuse to take prisoners. You cannot use poison gas. Uh trying to make war more humane. That is
00:05:07
absurd. Absolutely absurd. Uh I can assure any of your listeners that when a war is on, the war crimes rules as laid
00:05:17
down in the war are forgotten. Your problem is you kill the other guy before he kills you.
00:05:23
Most of the cases he investigated involved German soldiers killing American prisoners.
00:05:30
He says he sometimes had to dig up bodies of American pilots who'd been shot down and beaten to death.
00:05:36
He would write a report describing the crime, listing suspects, and naming which laws of war had been violated.
00:05:44
And then, his assignment changed. We begin getting reports that there are people coming out of
00:05:51
looks like work camps and they're all dressed in something looks like pajamas. And they all look like they're dying.
00:05:58
They're skinny. The first concentration camp Benjamin Ferencz was ordered to visit was one of
00:06:04
the largest, Buchenwald. An estimated 56,000 prisoners were killed there before it was liberated in
00:06:11
1945. Concentration camps were being liberated one after another and Benjamin Ferencz
00:06:19
was assigned to get to them and collect as much evidence as possible as quickly as possible.
00:06:25
He was looking for official camp records, registries of who had been killed, and which German guards and
00:06:31
officers had done the killing. How many camps did you actually go to to take reports?
00:06:38
have been about 10 camps. They didn't I didn't count them. I moved as fast as I could from one camp to another. Uh
00:06:44
the Hal, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, uh a whole series of camps. As fast as I could get,
00:06:51
the front was moving forward rapidly and I was following the front. I was getting
00:06:55
reports from headquarters as to where the action was and uh I would seize all the records in the
00:07:02
camp. I would go to the camp commander, uh the German who was in charge and the American who was in charge and I'd say,
00:07:09
"I'm here on orders of President of the United States and I want 10 men immediately surround the Schreibstube,
00:07:14
which is the office where the records are. Nobody goes in or out without my permission." And I'd seize them the uh
00:07:21
record keeping office where they kept records. The Germans, God bless them, are very careful. When they murder
00:07:27
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
00:07:33
uh I had the Totenbuch. The Totenbuch were the death registries of how many people were killed.
00:07:39
One of the inmates, he grabbed me when I came in. He hugged me and he said, "I've been waiting for you."
00:07:48
I can't I have difficulty recalling these stories because I'm still emotionally affected with what I saw. Uh
00:07:56
and he led me to a place near the barbed wire electrified wire around the camp. He had a shovel
00:08:04
with him and he dug up a little wooden box. Inside the box were identity cards, little booklets like a passport the
00:08:12
German soldiers would have stamped whenever they came and went. When when this little passport book was
00:08:18
filled, they got another one. He was supposed to destroy the old one. He didn't. He kept them.
00:08:27
Now, every time he did that, he took his life into his hands. They would have shot him dead on the spot if
00:08:34
they had seen what he was doing. And he held them. And those were then he buried them in a
00:08:40
box near the fence waiting for the liberation day. That of course was an invaluable piece
00:08:46
of evidence as to who was in the camp at what time. What were you thinking after seeing all
00:08:54
the things that you had seen? I was not thinking. I shut off my brain. This is not real. These are not human beings.
00:09:03
These are victims here and I can't stop and and and think and think and I just get your job done. Get your
00:09:10
job done. Get the hell out of here. There was disease rampant. Dysentery, diarrhea, rats,
00:09:17
filth, uh and uh get out and get out write your report. And I wrote my reports first chance I
00:09:25
got, you know, and uh with all the information, who was in the camp, who were the commanders, how many
00:09:31
people were there. It was necessary. When he visited the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria, he
00:09:39
described in a letter that prisoners were so frail, many were being carried like babies to a field hospital. He
00:09:47
wrote, "No one who has not seen it can visualize the scene." The inmates caught one of the guards
00:09:55
and uh they beat him up. I was there when they caught him, when they beat him. Uh they then took him to the crematorium
00:10:05
and put him in alive. Uh they strapped him to the gurney, which is what they used, a metal gurney,
00:10:11
to slide the bodies into the oven. They put him in, started to cook him, and they pulled him
00:10:16
out. He was still alive. They beat him up again, and then they put him in again.
00:10:21
And they cooked him slowly. These were the prisoners who were killing the guards.
00:10:35
Vengeance. Um that's inevitable outcome. Did I try to stop it? I did not. Um could I have stopped it? Probably
00:10:45
not. Um Do I remember it? I do. What's the next question? On the day after Christmas in 1945, he
00:11:04
was discharged with the rank of sergeant. He went back to New York, got married to
00:11:09
his long-time girlfriend Gertrude, and planned to practice law. At the same time, a trial was beginning
00:11:16
in Germany. Leaders of the Nazi Party were being prosecuted by an international military
00:11:22
tribunal. The trial was taking place in a town called Nuremberg, at the Palace of
00:11:28
Justice. This was the first Nuremberg trial. Nothing like it had ever been done before.
00:11:36
It was controversial. The guilt of the defendants wasn't really in question, so some wondered about the trial's
00:11:42
legitimacy. But the American chief prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson,
00:11:49
said it was important to create a detailed record of what had happened under Hitler's regime.
00:11:55
He said that if a record was not made, {quote} "Future generations would not believe how horrible the truth was."
00:12:03
12 more trials would follow, and Benjamin Ferencz was sent to Berlin to search Nazi offices and archives for
00:12:11
evidence of crimes committed not only by Nazi leaders, but also doctors, lawyers,
00:12:17
and businessmen. So we want to put the doctors on trial for medical experiments. We want to put
00:12:24
the lawyers on for perverting the law. We want to put the SS on for mass murder. We want to put the foreign
00:12:29
ministers on trial for trying to hoodwink the rest of the world. We want to explain how it was that a civilized
00:12:35
country like Germany could allow these things to happen and to make them happen and to do things which they
00:12:43
did. Over the course of his research in Berlin, he identified another group he thought should be tried, the
00:12:50
Einsatzgruppen. The word Einsatz means action. Gruppen is groups. And these action groups were assigned
00:13:00
to kill without pity or remorse every single Jewish man, woman, or child they could lay their hands on, and to do the
00:13:08
same with Gypsies and anybody else who might be a suspected potential enemy of the Reich.
00:13:14
And there were 3,000 men divided into groups A, B, C, and D. I came upon reports of these
00:13:23
Einsatzgruppen, daily reports, top secret, sent from the front to Berlin, where they were consolidated
00:13:31
and sent out, and I had a distribution list of 99 people who later said I didn't know anything about it. And they
00:13:38
reported faithfully who was the commander in charge, how many Jews they killed, in which town.
00:13:45
And I had a little adding machine. I added them up. When I reached a million, over a million people murdered by these
00:13:52
groups. I said, "We have to put on those trial." Benjamin Ferencz flew the records to
00:13:58
Nuremberg and showed them to the chief prosecutor and asked for an additional trial.
00:14:04
He said, "No, we can't. Depending on his approved the budget, we cannot expect any additional uh trials because there's
00:14:12
a lot of opposition to it as well, and all the lawyers are assigned. The other trials already started."
00:14:19
And I said, "You cannot let these million murderers get go go. This is the biggest murder trial in history. We
00:14:26
cannot just simply say because we run out of space or money, you can't you can't let them go." And uh
00:14:33
he said, "Well, can you do it in addition to your other work of supervising the search for documents?" I
00:14:39
said, "Sure." He said, "Okay, you're it." So I became the chief prosecutor of what later was known as the biggest
00:14:45
murder trial in human history. [Music] Benjamin Ferencz was assigned to be the chief prosecutor for the Einsatzgruppen
00:15:06
case. He was only 27 years old, and he had never tried a case before. He says he'd never even been to court.
00:15:14
There were 22 defendants, members of these special so-called action groups. I said, "Look, I don't want to talk to
00:15:22
these defendants. I had researchers who spoke German, German refugees. Uh I want you to go down and interrogate
00:15:30
this guy. I want to know everything about him from the moment he was born. You get all the information back to me,
00:15:36
but I didn't want to talk to any of them. I said, 'I'll see them in the courtroom.'
00:15:40
Uh and I didn't want to set up any human connection um because I had picked the defendants,
00:15:47
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
00:15:54
generals, something on I don't remember the count. And I selected them. How did you Why did you select those
00:16:01
that were higher rank? Because responsibility begins at the top. It doesn't begin
00:16:07
at the bottom. Lothar Fendler. How do you plead to this indictment? Guilty or not guilty?
00:16:19
Nicht schuldig. Waldemar Schütz. Heinz Schubert. How do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?
00:16:27
[Music] Nicht schuldig. You're now ready to hear the presentation by the prosecution. Here's
00:16:36
Benjamin Ferencz. This was the tragic fulfillment of a program of intolerance and
00:16:44
arrogance. Vengeance is not our goal. Nor do we seek merely a just retribution. We ask this court
00:16:57
to affirm by international penal action man's right to live in peace and dignity
00:17:05
regardless of his race or creed. The case we present is a plea of humanity to law.
00:17:18
And uh they didn't ask for the death penalty. I gave it very deep thought, what am I
00:17:23
going to ask for? You got these 22 guys there. They have murdered over a million
00:17:30
people. There's no question about their guilt. Should you chop them up into a million
00:17:35
pieces and feed them to the dogs? I said, "That would be ridiculous." Uh just hang them, shoot them, take them
00:17:43
out, and have a public display? I said, "No, it'd be ridiculous, too." I said, "If it's going to have any
00:17:50
meaning to this trial, we have to be aware, first, that the victims were slaughtered
00:17:58
because they didn't share the race, the religion, and or the ideology of their executioners."
00:18:04
I said, "If I could turn that around and make it a crime to kill somebody because he doesn't
00:18:12
share your race, your color, or your political persuasion. Uh if you can get that a crime against humanity, if you
00:18:21
can get that out, then you will protect future generations, at least to some extent, and it would be worthwhile and
00:18:28
more meaningful than what you do with these 22 murderers." The 22 defendants are found guilty of
00:18:36
membership in a criminal organization, war crimes, and of committing crimes against humanity.
00:18:43
14 of the 22 were sentenced to death. [Music] My personal reaction was very somber.
00:18:57
I didn't say, "Hooray, good for you." And so on. On the contrary, I got a splitting headache every time he
00:19:05
said, "Tribunal sentence you to death by hanging." Boom. It was like a hammer hitting me in the head. "The death
00:19:13
This tribunal sentence you to death by hanging." Next, death by hanging, death by hanging, death by hanging. I thought
00:19:19
my head was going to bust. Uh and in fact, we had planned, as was customary, when the trial came to an end, the chief
00:19:26
prosecutor had a party for his staff, and I had a planned a party for my staff. Uh
00:19:33
and I couldn't go to my own party. I called home. It was being my house. I said, "I'm going to bed."
00:19:39
And uh so it was not one of joy or victory. Uh it was a a very somber experience, what I would
00:19:50
say. After the trial, he and his wife Gertrude stayed in Germany. They had four children, all born in Nuremberg.
00:20:04
He worked on restitution and reparations efforts and helped return property to Holocaust survivors. If you do somebody
00:20:12
a harm, wrongful harm, you have an obligation to try to make good by either compensating him or trying to repair the
00:20:20
damage done. That was a guiding principle, a very simple principle of justice. And with that and with no experience
00:20:28
whatsoever in doing such a thing, which had never happened after a war that the victor
00:20:34
uh defeated has to pay off the victor. They had reparations which never worked, but individual compensation never had
00:20:40
been tried before and I said, "We'll do it now." Then after that, of course, is uh
00:20:47
after you stopped the war, punished the criminals, set up compensation for the victims, the
00:20:55
next step, the most important, prevent it from happening again. And that's what I've been doing ever since.
00:21:03
In 1956, he returned to the United States with his family to begin a career in private law practice.
00:21:09
And he started writing about international law and speaking about his experiences at Nuremberg.
00:21:16
His ideas were instrumental in the development of the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
00:21:22
He gave the closing statement in the court's first case against the Congolese warlord.
00:21:28
He's still working today at 99. I asked him about retirement and he said he has no desire to play golf.
00:21:36
And you care for your wife. Of course, that's primary obligation number one because we have the world
00:21:43
record, I am sure. My wife, I married an older woman, she's about 5 months older
00:21:47
than me. And uh we have been happily married since 1946. Uh how many years is that? That's I don't
00:21:59
know. Uh 72. It's 72 years, we never had a quarrel. Uh that's pretty damn good. How is that How is that possible? It's
00:22:07
very possible. Uh first of all, I'm not suggesting we didn't have differences of opinion, but
00:22:12
we never raised our voice, we never shouted, we never pounded the table because it's mutual respect and caring for each
00:22:21
other. They have a funny word for it that I don't like, love. Uh I don't like the word because you can
00:22:26
love piece of cheese, you can love the lovely day, you know, I can love to go home, I love to finish this interview.
00:22:34
And I say, "Hey, if you say caring for somebody, that's reflects better. And my wife now needs my care. It's It's uh
00:22:43
take home pay, you know? It's just payback time. [Music] In 2016, Benjamin Ferencz quietly donated a
00:22:55
million dollars to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. The footpath next to the Peace Palace at
00:23:01
The Hague was named after him. [Music] Criminal is produced by Lauren Spore, Nadia Wilson, and me.
00:23:24
Audio mix by Rob Byers. Mathilde Erflino is our intern. Special thanks to Michael
00:23:30
Wilkerson. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at
00:23:37
thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter at criminalshow. Criminal is recorded in the studios of
00:23:44
North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best shows
00:23:52
around. Shows like Radio Diaries. Radio Diaries tells extraordinary stories of ordinary life.
00:23:59
This summer, they've a brand new series called Last Witness, audio portraits of the last surviving witnesses to major
00:24:06
historical events, including the story of 103-year-old Olivia Hooker, the last survivor of the Tulsa race riot of 1921.
00:24:16
I guess the most shocking thing was seeing people to whom you had never done anything to irritate
00:24:27
who just took it upon themselves to destroy your property because they didn't want you to have
00:24:36
those things and they were teaching you a lesson. [Music] Those were all new ideas to me.
00:24:46
But uh I guess that's part of the growing up process. [Music] Go listen. Special thanks to AdZerk for providing
00:24:57
their ad serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. [Music]
00:25:14
Radiotopia from PRX.