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46 Int'l L. News 21 (2017)
Interview: Benjamin Ferencz, U.S. Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg Trials

handle is hein.journals/inrnlwnw46 and id is 61 raw text is: INTERVIEW BENJAMIN BERELL FERENCZ U.S. CHIEF PROSECUTOR AT NUREMBERG TRIAL By Renee Dopplick blenjainmn -erencz kNaew RoCnee' NY, 2001); photo by Der Spiegel Benjamin B. Ferencz was born in Transylvania in 1920 and moved to America when he was ten months old. After he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1943, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Under General Patton, Ferencz fought in every major battle of the war. He was later transferred to a newly created War Crimes Branch to gather evidence of Nazi brutality. When the war was over, Ferencz returned to New York and was subsequently recruited for the Nuremberg war crimes trials. At 27 years old, Ferencz was named Chief Prosecutor for the United States in the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen Case. The Associated Press called it the biggest murder trial in history. Twenty- two defendants were charged with murdering over a million people. It was his first case. Since then, Ferencz has devoted his life to studying and writing about world peace and replacing the rule of force with the rule of law He lives with his wife, Gertrude, in New Rochelle, New York, and Delray Beach, Florida. Your legal career has been one of dis- covery, risk taking, and thinking about the future. What has motivated you to push for rule of law and a more peace- ful, humane, and secure world? My parents fled poverty and persecu- tion and came to the United States. We lived in poverty most of the time. Even- tually, I won a scholarship at Harvard Law School for my exam in crimi- nal law, and I had decided then, even before the war, to devote myself to try- ing to prevent crimes, which I had seen all around me living in Hell's Kitchen in New York. At the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, the waging of aggressive war was indelibly branded as the supreme international crime. I didn't have to go to Nuremberg to learn that. I was a combat soldier who entered the war shortly after the war began. I was then 23 years old. I saw the horrors with my own eyes. My assign- ment was to go into the concentration camps as they were liberated to collect evidence of the horrors and atrocities so that they could be used in the trial against the perpetrators and that is what I did. After the war, I was unemployed like 10 million other solders, and I was invited by the Pentagon to return to Germany to help with the subsequent Nuremberg tri- als. It was there that I became the Chief Prosecutor of this most significant trial. What was most significant about it was it gave us and it gave me an insight into the mentality of mass murderers. They had murdered over a million people, including hundreds of thousands of children in cold blood, and I wanted to understand how it is that educated people - many of them had PhDs or they were generals in the Ger- man Army-could not only tolerate but lead and commit such horrible crimes. The reason I have continued to devote most of my life to preventing war, is my awareness that the next war will make the last one look like child's play. We have devoted all of our energy and money to building new weapons. We have failed to build the instruments necessary for peace- ful settlement of disputes, and the result is that the funds which are needed to care for refugees, for students, and for the aged, are wasted in an arms race for more destruc- tive weapons from cyberspace, which can cut off the electrical grid on any city on this planet, with the result of almost immediate death to most of the population. We will never succeed in ending wars totally; however, we can be a catalyst for moving in the right direction. That is what I have been doing. I've been moving a heavy rock up the hill, but there has been great progress. The progress goes up and then it comes down. It circulates-upward slowly and up and down. We have made fantastic progress over the years, but we still have a very long way to go because it's interrelated with so many other things; however, if I am going to have any impact at all, it seemed to me that I would be as a catalyst focusing on the rule of law and having that be used as a prime instrument to have people recognize that war itself has got to be abolished. During the course of your career, you saw the creation and expansion of international criminal law. How would you describe its growth? The main principles of the Nuremberg trials were affirmed by the UN Gen- eral Assembly and have been accepted as binding principles of international law. Among those principles are the conclusion that crimes are commit- ted by individuals, that the law must apply equally to everyone, that heads of state are liable, that there is no excuse for crimes despite your rank, and fun- damentally that crimes which are so offensive as to shock the conscience of humankind should be condemned as crimes against humanity These princi- ples seem to me to be very sound then, and they continue to be very sound. Declaring the law is one thing; respecting or enforcing it is another. The legal community, government leaders, WINTER 2018 IN IERNA IIONAL LAW NEWS r

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