Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials Remembers

97-year-old Sgt Benjamin Ferencz, originally from a Jewish family in Transylvania, helped liberate the death camps in Europe, became a chief US prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials and was instrumental in establishing the International Criminal Court. He is the last surviving prosecutor from the 1947 Nazi Nuremberg Trials.

Following a chance encounter with this inspiring man on the BBC World Service radio programme Hardtalk I have assembled these quotations. He spoke with self effacing honesty, his direct words often laced with a bitter humour.

As he says think about it and act on it.

• I served for three years in the United States Army, in every battle from the Battle of the Bulge to the beaches of Normandy, and I tell you there will never be a war without crimes – never – because warfare itself is the biggest crime of all.
• We were trying to show people how horrible it is if you take a leader who’s very charismatic, and unquestionably follow him, even to murdering little children. These were educated people; one was a father of five children. They were not all wild beasts with horns.
• These were patriots trying to do their duty to protect either their religion, their nationality or their economic security.
• They wanted to brag about how many they killed.
• War makes mass murderers out of otherwise decent people.
• Hell would be paradise, compared to what I saw.
• I never tried to do justice in the broad sense of holding every criminal accountable, it would have been a practical impossibility.
•  Vengeance is not our goal.

• We have not learnt the lessons of Nuremberg.
• The most powerful nations of the world are not yet ready to surrender what they perceive as a sovereign right to use whatever means they perceive to be necessary in order to protect their own interests as they see them.
• No politician appears without his flags flying.
• For centuries we have glorified warmaking.
• We have not learnt that you cannot kill an ideology with a gun.
• Use of armed force to obtain a political goal should be condemned as an international and a national crime.
• The world has changed, we’re not throwing rocks anymore, we’re gonna kill everybody.
• Think of all the money we are wasting on preserving the outdated nuclear weapons, which nobody knows what to do with and which are obsolete.

• My general reasoning is that the world is a small planet. We must share the resources on this planet, so that everyone can live in peace and human dignity, and it can be done. The recognition that we have to move as a unit gave us the EU, it gave us the US, 50 states with very differing opinions. Most wars are fought against another group, the ‘other’. When you are a part of the other, you’re less inclined to attack it.
• Law is always better than war.
• Law must apply equally to everyone.
• The re-education of the human spirit on a worldwide basis is the task before us, and we are doing it.
• Fundamental things such as colonialism and slavery, the rights of women, the emancipation of sex, landing on the moon, these were inconceivable not long ago. But miracles can be performed.

References

Ben Ferencz Website
Wikipedia
The Guardian Interview
BBC Hardtalk