As a little boy, Ben Ferencz was told: you’re either going to be a great lawyer or a great villain. “And because I didn’t want to be a villain, I knew that from the neighborhood where I grew up, I planned to become a lawyer – although I had no idea what that was,” Ferencz said in interviews. Some twenty years later, as a United States prosecutor, he faced 12 German war criminals in Nuremberg and, as he put it in his opening address, “made a plea of humanity to justice.”
With his work for the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II, the very young Ferencz laid the foundations for the concept of crimes against humanity and for their punishment in court. From this, partly due to his unremitting efforts, the International Criminal Court would emerge in 2002. At the age of 88, he opened the first criminal trial there in The Hague on behalf of the prosecutors in 2009. Ferencz passed away this Friday at the age of 103 in Boynton Beach, on the Florida coast. He was the last surviving protagonist of the Nuremberg tribunal.
In interviews and portraits, Ferencz always made room for a significant fact from his youth. His sister was born Hungarian in 1918, he was Romanian a year and a half later. “While we were born in the same bed, in the same place.” He just wanted to indicate that a person has no influence on the circumstances in which he or she is born. For the Ferencz family, one or the other nationality made no difference: Jews were discriminated against just as harshly in Romania as in the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy.
For that reason, the family emigrated to the United States. Ben was ten months old. His father, a cobbler, dreamed of patching cowboy boots in New York, the son later said in interviews. But because there were no cowboys in New York and his father had no other work, no money and no friends, the children grew up in abject poverty in the notorious neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Like their father and mother, they could not read or write. Until he was admitted to school, aged eight, Ben had only spoken Yiddish.
A wise teacher put Ferencz in first a good high school, then a good college, and finally Harvard. When Japan attacked the US, he wanted to join the Air Force, but he was so small that he was not considered suitable for any position. Eventually he was assigned to the anti-aircraft defense.
Immediately after the capitulation, he was asked if he wanted to collect evidence of the crimes committed by the Germans in the death camps. He went from camp to camp with the American army. “There he was traumatized for life,” says his son Don Ferencz Prosecuting Evil. In that documentary, his father talks about what he saw in the camps: the ground full of corpses, starving people who rummaged through the garbage like rats in search of food. He puts his hand over his eyes and stops. Then he says: “I was ice cold, I didn’t shed a tear and went on with my work.”
Do justice to victims
Partly on the basis of the evidence that Ferencz had collected, the Allies started the trial in Nuremberg against the perpetrators of the war of extermination against the Jews, the Roma and the Sinti. “Here power paid homage to justice,” as it is called in the documentary. The winners of the war wanted to do justice to perpetrators and victims.
In the first series of cases, the leaders of Nazi Germany were brought to justice. After that, the prosecutors also wanted to start cases against perpetrators other than politicians and military. They wanted to bring to justice the doctors who had conducted experiments on prisoners in the camps, judges who had administered justice during the Nazi era, industrialists, civil servants. Once again, Ferencz was sent out to find evidence. And so he found in archives in Berlin the records of the so-called Einsatzgruppenthe SS men who roamed Eastern Europe as death squads to kill Jews and partisans.
With that evidence in hand, the daily reports of the Nazi killing industry, conveyed to bureaucrats in Berlin who, immediately after the defeat, said ‘Wir haben es nicht gewusst‘, Ferencz was allowed to pronounce the closing statement himself this time. Film footage of the time shows a frail boy—according to friends, he was standing on a book to rise above the podium—beginning to say: “It is with sadness and hope that we set forth here the facts of a mass murder. ” The hope was that this trial would teach the world what had happened, so that it could never happen again.
Ferencz was 27 years old at the time, and said he had never been in a courtroom, let alone as a prosecutor. And now he heard the judge give one perpetrator after another the ultimate punishment: death by hanging. “I went to sleep with a pounding head afterwards.”
Compromise and compassion
After the tribunal, Ferencz joined the law firm of another Nuremberg prosecutor, Charles Telford Taylor, as calm and thoughtful as Ferencz was fiery and impulsive. He dealt with civil rights and freedom of expression cases. Human rights would always remain central to his career. The most important task for you, he told recent Harvard graduates in 2020, is “how do you get people to accept compromise, compassion and human rights as a task?”
Also read this interview with Ferencz from 2014: ‘I have never seen my suspects as animals’
In 1980 he wrote his first plea for a permanent international criminal court. In December 2000, the last month of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Ferencz wrote to him urging him to do so, along with Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and one of the spearheads of US military involvement in Vietnam. The intention to cooperate with such an international criminal court was Clinton’s last presidential decision. “You yourself would be one of the first suspects,” Ferencz had told McNamara.
Be first War on Terror Clinton’s successor George W. Bush feared what an international tribunal could do to American soldiers, and he put pressure on other countries never to extradite Americans to ‘The Hague’. Ferencz called the attitude of the Bush administration “an unnecessary slap in the face to the rest of the world”. It was a great disappointment to Ferencz that that attitude did not change when Barack Obama became president, nor under Joe Biden.