Palace of Justice – A Conversation with Benjamin Ferencz

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1:07Last Friday on April 7th, Benjamin Frenz, 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 Ferenz 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 Ferenz, 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.

2:04I met Benjamin Ferenz 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.

2:45I 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.

3:45Benjamin Frenz 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.

4:09My sister was born in the same bed that I was born a year and a half earlier. And the one thing we had in common with whatever it 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 Harbor with no money, no friends, no language, no skills. Let me skip along because it's been a long life.

4:58Benjamin 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.

5:41Normandy, 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?

6:24The 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 the 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.

7:12He 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.

7:35We'll be right back.

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9:22We begin getting reports that there are people coming out of what looks 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.

10:08How many camps did you actually go to to take reports? It must have been about 10 camps. I didn't count them. I moved as fast as I could from one camp to another. Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenburg, Grossgerau, 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 States and I want 10 men immediately surround the Schreibstruhe, which is the office where the records are.

10:51Nobody owes 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 gave 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 Totenbursch. The Totenbursch 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.

11:38He 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 that spot if they had seen what he was doing. And he held them. And 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.

12:25What 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 the hell out of here. There was disease, rampant, 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.

13:20He 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, a 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.

14:05these 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

14:27What's the next question?

14:35On 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.

15:18But 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. Twelve more trials would follow, 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.

16:00We 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. to make them happen, 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.

16:41And 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.

17:27I said, we have to put out a new trial. Benjamin Frenz 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?

18:13I said, sure. He said, okay, you're it. So I became the chief prosecutor of what later was known as the biggest murder trial in human history.

18:31We'll be right back.

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19:45Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash yourrichbff. 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 and 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.

20:27I said, I'll see them in the 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, if I 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.

21:25Here's Benjamin Friends. 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.

22:07And 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.

22:53I 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.

23:39My 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 sentenced you to death by hanging. next death by hanging death by hanging death by hanging i thought my head was going to bust uh and in fact we had planned it 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 uh and i couldn't go to my own party i called almost me in my house i said i'm going to bed and uh so it was not one of joy or victory, it was a very somber experience, I would say.

24:45After 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, a wrongful harm, you have an obligation to try to make good by either compensating him or trying to repair the damage done. That was a guiding principle, a very simple principle of justice. And with that and with no experience whatsoever in doing such a thing, because it never happened after a war that the victor defeated has to pay off the victor. They had reparations, which never worked, but individual compensation never had been tried before.

25:31And I said, we do it now. Then after that, of course, is after you stop the war, punish 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 a Congolese warlord.