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(dramatic music)

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(emotional music)

I carry with me the burden of having seen

man's inhumanity to man in ways

which are incredible to a rational mind,

and that will always remain with me.

I am Ben Ferencz.

70 years ago, I was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials

in what was certainly the biggest murder trial in history.

Ben Ferencz is an icon, really

in international criminal justice.

We're talking about a man whose career

spans seven decades.

Ben: This trial, well what was most significant about it

was it gave us an insight

into the mentality of mass murderers.

They had murdered over a million people,

including hundreds of thousands of children in cold blood.

Ben is the personification of the international do-gooder.

Somebody who has no goal in life

other than to bring justice to an unjust world.

My dad used to ask us, and I kid you not,

around the dinner table every night,

what have you done for mankind today?

Ben: War can make murderers

out of otherwise decent people.

That may come as a shock to some of the viewers

who perceive these mass murderers as horrible beasts.

Not so.

Such a young age,

in such a critical moment in modern history

to be in the thick of things,

to do the right thing with conviction and courage,

and to have witnessed what he had witnessed

and turned that into a positive contribution

for a better humanity.

It's really something to admire and try to emulate.

Ben: The impact of war itself on people

affected me so that I wanted to stop war-making,

and have in fact devoted most of my life in that effort

to try and create a more humane world.

His humanity and his compassion

and his fearless commitment to justice all of these years

make him one of the most important figures of our time.

(emotional music)

I'm mindful of the fact that the world

has always been torn apart by the type of horror

which is featured on TV,

but I'm also always mindful of the fact

that we are, believe it or not,

making very significant progress

toward creating a more humane and peaceful world.

Okay, Ben Ferencz welcome it says.

Ben is someone who is very driven,

who is extremely passionate,

and has an absolutely unshakeable belief

in the rule of law

and in international law that's what drives him.

He is somebody who thrives on this passion

and thrives on the effort to

try to move things forward that seem impossible.

When I was a boy or a student,

there was no such thing as human rights.

There was no such thing as international courts.

No one heard of the word genocide for one thing,

and I was the first I believe to use that word

in the opening paragraph of an indictment

where I was the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg.

Benjamin Ferencz is the titan

of international criminal prosecutions.

He really established an incredible

mandate for international criminal responsibility

for the commission of crimes

against humanity and war crimes.

He laid out a legal process that has become

a very important one, taking us into the 21st Century.

I'd never tried a case.

I'd never been in a criminal court in my life.

I was 27 years old.

But I knew at the beginning that if this trial

is going to have any significance at all,

it has to set a model of what you should and shouldn't do.

This is a.

"Order National De La Legion d'Honneur,

Presidente de la Republique Francaise".

Names me a "Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur".

That gold medal you see hanging there

is the Medal of Freedom which I was

particularly glad to receive

because the previous recipient of that

had been Nelson Mandela, and I was a strong admirer of his.

(gentle piano music)

I was told that I'd make a good lawyer or a good crook,

and I didn't quite understand it

'cause I didn't know what a lawyer was,

but I knew what the crook was

and I didn't care for it at any time,

so I think that may have tilted me

toward wanting to be a lawyer, whatever that meant.

My sister was born in the same bed I was later born in.

When she was born, she was a Hungarian.

When I was born about 18 months later, I was a Romanian.

It doesn't really matter what you call the country.

What matters is how you treat the people in the country,

and in both Hungary and Romania,

they persecuted the Jews.

So it was prudent for my parents to get out if they could.

We traveled third class because there was no fourth class.

Sleeping on an open deck in midwinter in 1920 was not easy.

I was crying all the time because my mother had no milk.

My father was being driven crazy with this noise.

He couldn't sleep.

He was very tempted to throw me overboard.

And there's been some indication that he would've

had he not been interrupted by my uncle

who was traveling with us.

My father was trained as an apprentice shoemaker.

He thought when he gets to New York,

he'll be able to make boots for the people.

No one told him there were

no cowboys in New York and no cows.

So he found himself unemployable,

no money, no friends.

It was a tough life, but they didn't know it

because where they'd come from it was tougher,

so it was an improvement no matter what.

This was an area known as Hell's Kitchen.

It got that name because it was a high crime density area.

When I became a criminologist I found that out

by seeing maps of where the most crime was

in parts of the world.

It was right at home.

It was a tough neighborhood, Irish and Italian.

With a lot of gang warfare going on,

but it was no guns, no knives.

It was just you know beating each other up

or playing craps on the sidewalk.

I didn't speak English at all.

I spoke Yiddish was the mother tongue.

My father took me to school, public school to enroll me.

They wouldn't take me because I was too small,

I couldn't speak English, and they said come back next year.

Next year they said the same thing,

so I finally ended up when my parents were divorced

and I went to live with an aunt in Brooklyn,

that's where I started my educational career.

(gentle piano music)

My eighth grade teacher in public school 80 in the Bronx,

I was then living back again

with my mother and my stepfather.

She asked me to bring my father and mother in.

She wanted to talk to them

and we had a little conference.

The teacher explained that this is a gifted boy,

and he should go to college.

Well certainly she didn't know and I didn't know

what a gifted boy meant, 'cause we never got any gifts

and I didn't know anybody who ever went to college.

This was beyond our knowledge range,

and my mother said well whatever you want to do,

you know she would accommodate that.

The Townsend Harris High School

which was the only one of its kind in the country

where if you graduated from there

you were automatically admitted to City College.

I never had to study before.

I heard something and I knew it,

and it was just you know it seemed to be quite automatic,

but when I got to this advanced high school,

I flunked the two subjects of French and algebra.

So I found out there was a movie house

featuring foreign films right near where we live

and I went there, and fell in love

with the French actress Danielle Darrieux,

and she was being wooed by Charles Boyer

and I could hear them and I could

read in English what they were saying.

That was a wonderful teaching tool,

except I came out speaking like Charles Boyer.

(speaks French language)

.and all that, and that was very good in French.

Spoke like a Frenchman.

City College.

It was known as the poor man's Harvard actually.

I didn't know that at the time,

but it was a very tough school for a lot of tough kids,

mostly Jewish kids who couldn't afford a college education.

It was a very good school.

Taught me there first of all, I have to study.

Secondly there's a lot I have to learn

and I think I did.

You had to decide what you wanted to do

while you were still in college,

and most of my friends were going into civil service

or something like that.

I wanted to go into crime prevention

because I'd seen enough crime and I've seen juvenile crime

so I was focusing on juvenile delinquency.

I didn't know anything about college, about law schools

and I inquired "What's the best school?"

And I heard that Harvard is the best school, not Brooklyn.

All right, so I sent a letter to Harvard applying

and lo and behold, I was accepted.

I had done so well on my criminal law exam

that they gave me a scholarship based on that.

Otherwise I could never ever afford to.

I realized that there were different classes of people

and the students who got up and said "Sir"

every time they asked him a question,

which seemed to me very strange,

and who wore loafers and no socks or argyle socks

and went punting on the Charles on the weekend.

This was another world,

and they had fraternities and things like that.

I had a few friends from City College

who also went to Harvard, and I palled around with them,

but that was another social world at Harvard itself.

I found a program in the government

where if you were working for a professor

they gave you a stipend.

I had no money, I had no money at all.

Roscoe Pound I particularly admired.

He was known for his jurisprudence.

He was an old man.

He could hardly see, he had an eye shade

and I wanted to work for him.

He said "No, I can't accept that."

"It has to go through my brain," he said, his brain.

"I can't get it go through somebody else's brain."

So he turned me down.

So I went to see the next professor

that I was interested in was Sheldon Glueck.

He was the only one who taught criminology

and his first question "How much is it gonna cost?"

I said it's free.

He said "I'll take it."

So I became an assistant to him

and when the war had broken out,

he began to study war crimes.

So his first assignment was get me everything

in the Harvard law library that relates to war crimes.

That became more relevant because I suspect,

I don't know that when the army turned to him

he was consulting with the Pentagon.

They turned to him because he'd written

these books on war crimes.

That he said go find Benny, he's out there somewhere

and they tapped me and they sent me to Patton's headquarters

and they said your name has been forwarded from Washington.

So I can only imagine that it came from Sheldon Glueck.

(somber music)

What opened my eyes was of course the headlines.

Newspapers they were murdering all the Jews.

I said how can I sabotage the German government?

And so what I did was I wrote to the local consulate

and I said please, I'd like to disseminate

some of your literature to justify Hitler and so on

and they sent me piles and piles

of propaganda, absolute propaganda.

I took them and threw them in the garbage.

That was my form of sabotage against the German government.

The war broke out, and I went with everybody I knew

to try and volunteer at the

different branches of the service,

and most of them they wouldn't take me at all.

As an Air Force pilot they said I couldn't reach the pedals.

A navigator they said if I'd been told to bomb Berlin

I'd end up in Tokyo.

As a paratrooper they said you'll go up instead of down.

'Cause there was a desperate need for my skills,

I was furious, absolutely furious

because they wouldn't take me.

I asked myself what can I do to be of most help?

And because I could speak French like a Frenchman,

I thought if they can drop me behind the lines

in occupied France and teach me how to use dynamite,

I'll be able to blow up all the German trains

and communication lines.

They'll wish they were back in Berlin.

And ended up finally as a buck private in the artillery

about which I knew absolutely nothing.

As a typist in a supply room.

I couldn't even type and they never taught me how to type.

So the dumbest things you could possibly do

with a guy who's eager to serve, they did to me.

And I've never forgiven them.

We were trained to shoot down

high flying planes.

That was going to be our mission.

I am of the firm opinion today still

that we shot down more American

and British planes than German planes.

I had an assignment, we all did,

and when we see an American plane coming over

and he doesn't give us the correct signal,

friend or foe, bum bum bum

you hit the plane and it explodes.

I never go to see fireworks.

I've seen 'em.

The whole sky is brightened, and then we go

each one of us soldiers carrying a little cardboard box,

walking hip to hip trying to find

a piece of finger to identify the body.

Find out who the hell is what.

We knew it was an American plane by that time,

but you gotta report to next of kin that the guy's dead.

Smashed to smithereens.

The engine would still be, you know, partly intact

but to find a finger was already a great discovery.

I found several fingers or you find a clump of hair.

You put it in the box,

you send it back to the adjutant general

let 'em work it over and notify the next of kin.

It's war.

(gentle piano music)

I tell ya', I didn't stop

and ask myself what's my emotional state?

I asked myself what's next?

Move move, you know?

There's no time for emotion.

No time for being shocked for tears or anything like that.

(gentle piano music)

My final assignment in the army

was to be a war crimes investigator

entering the concentration camps as they were liberated

in order to collect evidence for the crimes.

We get a report into headquarters.

Attack battalion so and so has come upon a scene

where there are people walking out of

looks like a work camp of some kind.

They're all dressed in something like pajamas

and looks like they're all starving.

That was about the gist of the report.

Get to the colonel, the colonel hands it to Ferencz,

or to captain to Ferencz.

I get in a Jeep and off I go.

(gentle piano music)

My dad is a guy who has been traumatized by what he saw,

smelled, heard, and felt you know

with his own eyes, ears, hands.

I read quite a number of letters that he wrote

while he was there liberating the camps.

What he saw, what he felt while this was going on.

This has fueled a nuclear reactor inside this man,

and it's still, still, still what he does every day.

(gentle piano music)

I would first find the commanding officer

of the tank battalion.

I'd go to him and say I'm here on orders of General Patton.

War crimes investigator.

I want 10 men immediately surround

the (speaks German) office,

nobody goes in or out without my permission.

And look back on it, you know

I built a screen, some sort of a screen

before my mind to say this is not real.

This is you know, just go ahead you know?

It's incomprehensible to a rational human mind.

People lying dead on the floor.

You don't know if they're dead or alive.

The floor is covered with dead people.

Some of them are moving.

They're pleading with their eyes, help me you know?

They're dressed in rags, you know complete rags.

The SS is fleeing, trying to run out the other end.

Some inmates who were alive catching SS men

and beat 'em to death or burn 'em alive.

I've seen that too.

And the medics are not yet there.

You know they'll be coming in soon,

and the crematorium going.

Stacks of bodies, looks like skeletons, all of 'em bones

piled up like cord wood in front of the crematorium.

The stench in the air,

the human beings behaving like rats in a garbage pile

digging, crawling for a bite to eat.

(gentle piano music)

I can't go on describing it.

It becomes vivid again, and I was ice cold.

I didn't shed a tear, I didn't hesitate.

I did my job, because that was my job

and to get out as fast as you can.

The war was over, and I joined the army to help win the war.

We had won.

My primary goal after that was to get home

as soon as possible, try to resume a normal life.

Not in the wildest imagination

would I have dreamt that I would've turned around

and gone back to Germany.

That was the furthest thing from my mind.

I was with 10 million other GIs coming home,

looking for a job.

And when the cable came from the Pentagon

saying "Dear sir," they'd never called me sir before,

"will you please come to Washington?

"We want to talk to you," I assumed that was

in connection with job application

and off I went to Washington,

and then my life took a different turn.

(somber music)

Richard Dicker: The end of the second World War,

where Europe, parts of Asia, just devastated.

How many millions of people dead?

And not just deaths, but crimes committed on unimaginable,

industrial scale by the Third Reich in Germany.

The pictures from the liberated concentration camps

did horrify people.

They were so atrocious

that they couldn't be left unanswered.

Something had to happen.

You couldn't just have a settlement

and go back to normal.

The Allied powers decided that you had to

stigmatize what happened.

That this had to have consequences.

We know there are some people who said "Just take out

the Nazi murderers and shoot them."

There are others who said "Just let it alone.

What's past is past."

To its credit, the US administration

insisted on a trial.

And to see the 22 top Nazi leaders still alive

in the dock in that courtroom in Nuremberg,

I think sent a signal

that these kinds of crimes

could be prosecuted fairly

and those responsible held to account.

(dramatic music)

Attention, tribunal.

Narrator: Judges from Britain, America, Russia,

and France assemble in Nuremberg's courthouse.

Empowered to impose sentence of death

or such punishment as it may consider just,

the tribunal sits in judgment

upon 20 leaders of the Nazi party.

Henrike: To think of the situation in summer 1945,

what a lot of German cities looked like,

it was really challenging to find a place

where you could hold such a trial.

You would need the building, you would need the prison.

You know just infrastructure, you would need an airport,

something where you could fly in people

and they ended up here in Nuremberg

because the palace of justice had survived the war

more or less undestroyed,

and of course there also was the symbolic aspect.

(speaks German)

Nuremberg was the place where the Nazis

held their annual party rallies,

so it's more than an infrastructural question.

The symbolism was very much in the heads

of those planning the Nuremberg Trials in July 1945.

If you go back and read the transcript

of the original IMT, the International Military Tribunal,

the way Robert Jackson addressed the court,

I mean this is not your classic opening statement.

This is poetry in motion.

The privilege of opening the first trial in history

for crimes against the peace of the world

imposes a grave responsibility.

The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish

have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating

that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored

because it cannot survive their being repeated.

I do think that he had a sense

that the world, when that trial has ended,

would not be the same in international law.

You know, he had this sentiment

that this is world history,

that he was, that he was part of

or even the driving force of.

That four great nations,

fleshed with victory and stung with injury,

stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit

their captive enemies to the judgment of the law

is one of the most significant tributes

that power has ever paid to reason.

The Nuremberg Trials were the first time

in modern times that we had defined crimes against humanity,

genocide, war crimes, in such an explicit way

and then held men accountable for violating them.

I was interviewed by a colonel Mickey Marcus

who was in the Pentagon,

and his job was to try to recruit staff

for subsequent proceedings after the.

International Military Trial was finished.

And he said there's somebody else wants to talk to you

and that was then colonel Telford Taylor.

Telford Taylor had been assigned by president Truman

to carry on the work of Jackson

by being the chief of counsel for the 12 subsequent trials

were being planned.

So he said "I'm considering you know"

"you going back with me," he said

"but I have checked your army record and your background

and I understand that you're occasionally insubordinate'"

and I said "That's not correct, sir.

I'm usually insubordinate.

I do not obey any orders that I know are stupid or illegal,

but I've been checking up on you too,"

and I had in the interim,

"and I don't think you'll give me that kind of order."

He was also a Harvard graduate,

and he'd checked my record.

So he smiled and he said "You'll go with me."

These were to be 12 additional trials

because it was recognized by just taking a snapshot

of the International Military Tribunal top Nazi leaders,

you still didn't quite understand

how it would be possible

for a civilized country like Germany

to engage in the type of atrocities

for which they were responsible.

And the idea of these subsequent proceedings,

as they were called, was to put the doctors on trial,

a sampling who performed medical experiments

on concentration camp inmates.

The lawyers and judges who perverted the law

which was the framework on which they built the film.

Judgment at Nuremberg.

You had the industrialists like IG Farben

who provided the money to build Auschwitz,

and who were working people to death for their own profit

in their own companies.

Give them a chance to state their case.

The foreign ministry people, and then the SS squads

who were the real, the murderers on the scene.

So the idea was to take a sampling

for these 12 different categories and project that

and through the form of these 12 trials

to give a comprehensive picture,

and Telford Taylor was to be chief of counsel for those 12.

I can imagine no two more different people

than Telford Taylor and Ben.

Telford, this very tall, elegant, WASPy gentlemen

who could not have been more polite and thoughtful,

you never got a quick answer out of Telford.

It was always let me think about that.

And then this kind of dynamo of a tiny little Jewish guy

with none of the kind of elegance of Telford.

He had the same elegance of mind,

but not elegance of physical appearance.

I can easily see the attraction.

He was brilliant, insightful, determined.

He had all the qualities that one would look for

if one were Telford Taylor.

By the time we got there to that stage,

he had already picked lawyers for most of his trials,

and he said "Ben look, you have the experience in the field"

of going into the camps,

collecting evidence for the army trials.

We have a number of suspects,

but if you have a suspect and no evidence you have nothing.

"Your job is to go find the evidence."

So I took a staff of about 50 people

and went to Berlin, set up the organization

to start searching in the archives

of the Foreign Ministry,

the SS, the Gestapo, the army, and the industrialists

to see what evidence we had

that they had committed war crimes.

It was in that capacity that one of my staff members,

a boy from Switzerland came and he said look what I found

in the offices of the Foreign Ministry,

and it was a complete dossier,

the daily reports coming in from the front

saying how many Jews these units had murdered.

Now these units were called Einsatzgruppe,

and it was deliberately disguised

so you couldn't tell from the name what it was,

because their assignment was to go in

behind the German lines and then murder,

they never used the word murder,

they said eliminate, exterminate,

every single Jewish man, woman, and child they could lay

their hands on and do the same thing for the Gypsies

and do the same thing for any suspected

possible enemies of the Reich.

That was their job.

They had these daily reports sent back to Berlin

where they were consolidated and put together in a folder

and then each of those reports was sent down

and I had the distribution list,

to 99 different branches of the German government.

To people like the army who said

I never heard anything about that

down in my area and so on.

That was baloney, they are under my distribution list

so I took an adding machine and began to add them up

and when I reached a million people murdered,

I said that's enough.

I took a sampling, took the next plane from Berlin

where I had the headquarters for that,

went down to Nuremberg and I said "General,"

by that time he had been promoted,

"we got to put on a new trial."

The Einsatzgruppe were task forces

moving behind the front lines

and their only purpose was to kill

Jews, minorities, and opposition.

So they were really like killing squads.

These were the forces that rode around

and machine gunned

whole villages and communities

lined up on the edge of mass graves.

This was not the industrial horror of Auschwitz.

This was a direct

human being to human being atrocity.

It concentrated in a very direct way

the ability of one human being

to savagely destroy another

in a way that is just incomprehensible.

He said "I'm sorry, we can't do it."

All the 12 trials have been approved by the Pentagon.

We have, the staff has already been assigned.

We don't have staff, we probably can't get approval

for any more crimes anyway.

The Pentagon had already cooled

"on the trials, so we can't do it."

"Ah," I said, "you can't let these guys go.

I have in my hand mass murder on an incredible scale.

The evidence is all here.

"You're not gonna let these guys walk away."

He said, "Well can you do it in addition to your other work?"

And I said, "Sure!"

And he said "Okay, so you do it."

Okay, and so it happened that I became the chief prosecutor

of what turned out to be

the biggest murder trial in human history.

I have to say looking back on myself at 27,

I don't know about you, I can't think of very many people

who would've had the confidence, the skill,

and the knowledge in a new legal territory

to be so persuasive in that role.

First of all, you only pick a guy who's in captivity.

You don't name Adolf Hitler 'cause you know he's dead,

and there's no sense putting him in.

So I first said is he dead or alive, and do we have him?

If we haven't got him, you know

Mengele and people like that, forget it.

They may be the top, but we haven't got 'em.

So you have to know he's in captivity.

(somber music)

Now, and what evidence do we have against him?

The Einsatzgruppe was easy.

I had their daily reports.

I had the roster of all the members of the Einsatzgruppe.

So I just went through them and picked me out

the highest ranking ones,

and so they had about five or six generals.

I had no enlisted men in my dock.

Having been an enlisted man in the United States Army

maybe I was biased.

No enlisted men in my dock.

Give me the highest rank and the best educated.

Those are the two criteria.

Many of them with doctor degrees,

doctor, Dr. Rasch had a double doctorate

and I never had heard that before.

I was surprised at doctor doctor, two doctorates.

He killed 33,721 Jews in two days.

29, 30 September, 1941.

I got the bastard.

(laughs)

(somber music)

Ben: I was the first one in the courtroom.

I went in, I sat down, there was nobody but me.

I was thinking over my statement

which I had written the day before.

I was seeing if I could improve it,

and I was waiting for the trial to begin.

I was calm.

I was determined.

I didn't realize I would be making history.

We are now ready to hear

the presentation by the prosecution.

I made the opening statement, which stated the case.

It did not appear on the film,

because the film didn't start rolling

until after the first paragraph had been done,

and what it left out was the important beginning.

It was, "May it please your honors,

it is with sorrow and with hope

that we here disclose the massive murder

of a million people et cetera."

This was the tragic fulfillment

of a program of intolerance and arrogance.

But I was very specific.

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.

So here at 27, I don't know about you,

27 is just the beginning of being a grownup

and he was in front of the world.

He wasn't just in front of these judges and these defendants.

He was in front of the world

making a case as a prosecutor.

Looking at the judges and saying

the case we present is a plea of humanity to law,

beautiful stuff.

Honestly, it was years for me

before I wouldn't get literally teary eyed and emotional

just saying those words because I think they're

so powerful, so beautiful, so applicable,

so apropos to what's happening today.

We shall show that these deeds of men in uniform

for the methodical execution of long range plans

to destroy ethnic, national, political, and religious groups

which stood condemned in the Nazi mind.

Here's Ben standing on some books

so that he can be taller than the lectern

that is immediately in front of him.

I can only imagine what he must have felt like here.

This little Jewish guy who had his parents not left

would've been one of those gassed and killed,

standing and looking at these German supermen

and saying "I have more power now,

but I'm just a kid."

It must have been such a mixed feeling

of passion and determination, "I have to do this,"

and nervousness and a combination

of self-confidence and self-doubt.

Ben: I wasn't nervous at all.

I didn't kill anybody.

They were the ones who were nervous,

and they should have been 'cause I had the evidence.

You know this was really every prosecutor's dream.

You don't have to call a witness.

All you have to do is enter the documents,

primary documents saying when, where who did the killing.

Because you had enough written documentary material

that you could point at saying yeah,

here you say is this your signature?

And that's it.

You didn't need to have any more proof by witnesses.

And of course the Germans were cautious enough

to put everything into the books that they did.

And offered as prosecution exhibit 29,

I see there's another objection coming.

I'll continue the quote.

(speaks foreign language)

The defense lawyers who were generally German

were actually a highly talented group of lawyers,

and they bore themselves quite well in the courtroom

and they sometimes were able to challenge

the prosecution quite effectively.

They were very much individualists,

and they didn't come up with a sort of common strategy.

They all had their own strategies.

They were paid by the tribunal,

and for the times then

it was a considerable amount of money.

You know, in 1945 Germany was totally destructed

and for a lawyer I think it was quite a good thing to,

to work at the tribunal because you were given money

on a regular basis.

It should be recognized that in 1945 and '46,

the German people were not necessarily

seeking to tarnish the reputation

of their surviving leaders at that time.

There was a lot of opposition to Nuremberg

by the German people, and so when

they saw their leaders up on the stand

this was an assault on German honor.

And so you know the defense lawyers knew

that they sort of had the German people behind them

in representing the Nazi defendants on the stand.

Judge: Have you read the indictment?

Yeah.

Judge: How do you plead to this indictment?

Guilty or not guilty?

(speaks foreign language)

"Not guilty in the sense of the indictment"

is what they said, but what did that mean?

The judge said correctly, "We'll take that

as a plea of not guilty."

I think the defendants honestly believed

they were not guilty.

They had persuaded themselves that they did the right thing.

These were people who were

not necessarily born to become mass murderers.

They were susceptible to the pressures

that made them mass murderers in the Nazi regime.

That doesn't mean that I could ever do that.

I could never do that, no matter

what the circumstances were.

There are certain people who could never, ever become Nazis

and there are others who could've gone either way

and I think many of the defendants at Nuremberg

could have gone either way.

(speaks foreign language)

Dr. Otto Ohlendorf, General of the SS.

I knew him quite well.

Now, would I call him an animal?

He was rational.

He was I'm sure good to his cats and dogs.

He was the father of five children.

He made a sensible argument.

He was reasonably honest in his answers.

He said he would do it again,

even if they ordered him to kill his own sister

and the reason was Hitler knew that the Germans

were going to be attacked by the Russians

and Hitler had more knowledge than he did,

therefore he was in no position to challenge that.

And it was lawful, therefore to act

in anticipatory self-defense to prevent that from happening

and that's what he was doing.

He made an argument which the Pentagon would make today.

Self-defense was his plea.

Man: Very well, we'll leave this after one more question.

The figure of 90,000 is the best estimate you can give

at this moment.

I take it we must continue to read that

with the qualification which you gave in direct testimony

that you think there's a great deal of exaggeration in it.

He made the point, some of the commanders

would take the infants and just hold 'em by a leg

and smash their head against a tree

and he said I didn't believe in that.

He said, "I told my men when a mother has an infant"

and of course the infant is crying

and the mother is crying

and she's holding the infant to her breast,

aim for the infant because you'll kill both of them

with one shot, you'll quiet the mother,

"you'll save ammunition and it's much more humane."

"And there were other things."

For example, we had gas vans.

They were ordinary, you know, like trailers here

except that they attached the hose from the engine

to the inside so the fumes would

asphyxiate the people inside the van,

and they'd pack 'em in solid, lock 'em in,

and about 20 minutes they get to the place

where they're going to dump 'em, open the van

"and dump 'em all into the ditch."

But Ohlendorf said, "I didn't like the gas vans"

because some of them were not dead,

and then you had to sort 'em out by hand

and they were screaming and they were bloody

and they were messy, " and he said," it was bad

for the morale of the men to have to do that.

"So I told 'em I didn't want any more of the gas vans."

So Ohlendorf was really quite a decent chap,

you might say, aside from the fact

that he killed 90,000 Jews,

I'm sure he was quite a gentleman.

(somber music)

These million people were murdered

because they didn't share the race, the religion,

or the ideology of their executioners,

and I said, "That's a terrible crime

and it's a crime against humanity."

And I called it a crime against humanity.

And I said, "If we can prevent that in future

by condemning crimes against humanity,

we will reassert the legal right of all people

to be protected."

If we could establish a principle rule

which would protect humanity in the future,

then this trial would be significant.

For the first time, the international community

tried to put law as an answer

to these most horrible crimes

that originated from Nazi Germany.

And this was a revolution.

It started the way we think about

international criminal law.

About international law generally.

I had a list I made myself on a yellow page

in which I listed all the defendants

and I listed what I thought the sentence should be.

The actual sentences were more severe

than what I would have listed.

I was numb.

They're all imprisoned below the courthouse.

There is a lift, Black Maria they called

which keeps going around into the courthouse

and a sliding door which opens.

As each defendant came up,

they would hear the judge,

"For the crimes of which you are convicted,

this tribunal sentenced you to death by hanging."

Put the earphones back, take it off.

Bow, step back a step into the lift,

the door closes, and he drops down into hell.

That's what I saw.

One after the other, for the crimes of which

you are convicted, this tribunal

sentences you death by hanging, death by hanging,

death by hanging.

I thought my head was gonna bust.

It was customary for the chief prosecutor

to invite his staff for a party when every trial was ended.

I had a party arranged for my house.

I couldn't go to my own party.

I went home, went to bed.

My head was pounding with it.

So how do you describe that emotion, that feeling?

I didn't say I'm sorry for them.

I didn't say hooray for me.

It was a very tense, very severe emotional reaction

knowing that you're responsible for killing this guy.

Otto Ohlendorf, he was the only defendant

that I ever talked to

man to man

after he was sentenced to death.

I felt. look, this guy is gonna hang for sure.

He's the father of five kids, he has a wife,

he was honest on the trial.

Maybe he'll tell me something,

you know tell my children I love them,

tell my wife I'm sorry.

Nobody ever said they were sorry.

So I went down to talk to him,

and he's locked up in a cell

behind bars under the courthouse

and a little window opens up,

and I said to him

(speaks foreign language)

in German and I said: "Can I do something for you?"

And then he began: "You'll see I was right.

The Russians are gonna take over the Jews.

The Jews in America will suffer."

and he just goes repeating

the argument he read on the trial.

I let him go for about a minute,

and then I said, "Goodbye Mr. Ohlendorf" in English,

closed the door and left.

The next thing I saw I was invited to come to the hanging.

I refused to go, but they sent me the tape anyway

so I have a picture of him hanging by the neck

for eight minutes and then pronounced dead.

(gentle piano music)

I wanted to go home, but then something terrible happened.

(laughs)

I was approached by Jewish organizations

and they said, "Hey boy",

there's something else to be done here.

"What about the victims?"

And it didn't take long to convince me

they had managed to get a military government law enacted

saying that the property of murdered Jews

would go not to the German state,

but to a consortium of Jewish organizations

which would use it for charity purposes of the survivors

and that sounded like a very good idea,

except they wanted me to take it over

and to do the job.

I said, "How long do they think it'll take?"

They said, "Well, we'd like a commitment of two years."

Well I went back to my dear wife,

and she said, "Well the cause seems good enough,

but they said two years but if I know you

it'll only take one year.

So take the job."

Whereupon, being the sole employee,

I declared myself the director general

and set about to recover

the heirless unclaimed Jewish property.

Naturally, the cemeteries were unclaimed

because the Jewish congregations which had

built up these cemeteries for centuries were gone.

They were abolished, and the cemeteries

became property of the Reich.

So I immediately asserted ownership

of all these cemeteries

on behalf of the successor organization.

All well and good, except the question arose

who pays the course of the maintenance of the cemeteries?

Hundreds of cemeteries.

The Polish government and the Polish Red Cross

invited me to come to Poland

and be their guest for a week.

I said, "The only thing I really

wanted to see in Poland was Auschwitz

because I'd never been there

and it had been liberated by the Russians."

The field behind Auschwitz is covered with wild grass.

And under the grass, there was the fertilizer

taken from the crematorium, and I noticed

there were some black bones.

There were little bones of some kind.

They may have been the bones of a child or of a hand,

and I picked them up and I put them in my pocket.

Somebody asked me why am I doing that?

I said, "I want to be reminded

what the hell I'm doing in Germany."

Anyway, the question comes up

who's gonna maintain those cemeteries,

and at whose expense?

The Germans assure us that they will take care of it

as they would their own cemeteries for 20 years.

I said, "Wait a minute,

you take care of your own cemeteries for 20 years,

but in Jewish tradition once a cemetery, always a cemetery."

One of them says, "Mr. Ferencz you know,

be reasonable I mean, do you expect us to give them

more rights than we give to our own German citizens?"

At that point I exploded.

I really got mad and I pulled the bones out

and I said, "If they were alive

they wouldn't ask you to take care of the cemeteries.

You killed them, that's why they have to ask you!"

And I pounded the bones on the table

and I said, "You want them to pay you, ask 'em."

And the high tension because I very seldom get angry.

The chairman was very wise.

He said, "Meeting is adjourned for 15 minutes."

And we all got up and they all left me to...

We come back after 15 minutes

and the chairman says, "We accept your terms."

Just like that.

"Thank you very much."

And I left as soon as I could.

That meant that the German government

was legally responsible and I assume they've done it

'cause they're pretty good that way,

on maintaining all the Jewish cemeteries in perpetuity.

That's a fortune.

Those bones clinched the argument.

Without the bones, it would not have happened, I'm sure.

So I thought these were historic bones,

and I sent them to the Holocaust Museum

and I told them the story.

My wife Gertrude with whom I've been

happily wed for over 71 years,

she's also from Transylvania as I am.

She came to America when she was about 16 years old.

Also no language, no money, no skills.

Immediately went to work and went to night school

and got herself a Master's Degree in due course

and became a health teacher.

I've been very fortunate

because she has believed in what I was doing.

She tolerated my absences

when I was going on trips around the world.

My dad used to tuck us in at night.

He would tell us stories every night.

He would take each of his kids

on what he called dates on the weekend, one at a time.

He used to play King of the Hill you know, Blind Man's Bluff

or whatever the games were.

He was very involved with his kids,

particularly when we were young growing up.

So he made time for his kids.

Ben: It was time to go home.

I have my wife, I have four children born in Nuremberg.

I have to go home.

So I went home.

The big law firm said, "Oh it's great.

If we have to hang Nazis, we'll call you.

You got any clients?"

You know.

So I began to take your typical New York cases.

Somebody fell down the subway

and broke a leg, okay you know?

Telford had a similar experience.

He came back and he went into partnership

with his brother-in-law who happened to be

the dean of the Harvard Law School

when he signed my diploma.

His name was Landis, James Landis.

So he said, "Ben, why don't you come in with us?"

It didn't bring us any clients either.

But I was known as the lawyer

who takes hopeless cases on a contingent fee.

And what I did was I would find a moral situation

where the claimant didn't seem to have a chance,

but I felt it was right.

I went after them on a contingent fee

which was usually much less than the normal contingent fee.

They practiced human rights law

at a time when there was no such thing.

They practiced civil liberties law.

Every case they took was a do-gooder case.

Free speech cases, anti-McCarthyism cases,

every kind of case that I wanted to take

when I was a lawyer, and I think that

both Telford and Ben had an enormous impact

on a generation of lawyers my age.

I made enough money to invest it wisely and carefully,

and so from being a poor boy I got to be a rich boy.

And I gave away all my money.

I'm in the process of doing it still,

including to Cardozo, Harvard Law School, et cetera.

Taylor went to Vietnam and he wrote a book,

Nuremberg in Vietnam in which he made the point

that the United States forgot the lessons

we tried to teach the world in Nuremberg.

And he was an outspoken critic of the McCarthy regime.

He was very courageous, absolutely correct,

a good writer, high moral standards.

He deserved much more recognition

and responsibility than he had.

He was an excellent lawyer and never properly appreciated.

(gentle piano music)

We are in a time where we find the world

in many different areas

in heinous, horrible conflicts.

And the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall

had the hope and expectation that we'll

be in a more peaceful environment

and this turned out to be a horrible fallacy.

You know after the Holocaust we said never again

and we've seen it again and again and again and again

and there's no indication that it's going to end.

We are now spending even more money

to be in an arms race.

Who can build the weapons to kill more people?

That is the current state of the world,

and we have to recognize that

the only way out of this: law, not war.

The world is struggling for an answer.

And an answer could be

found in international criminal law.

Law could be an answer to conflicts with human suffering

of an honest, unseen nature.

The time has come, guys to stop this killing.

Have a court settle your disputes by peaceful means,

and until you do that, you're going to

continue killing yourselves.

And it's just common sense.

We have international crimes,

you need an international court.

So I began to write on the international criminal court.

I remember as a young lawyer

very interested in international law

I was with an international law firm.

I probably was the only person in the law firm

that bought Ben's books

because I was so impressed with what Ben Ferencz

had written in 1980 about you have to build

an international criminal court.

You have these individuals who

become part of international law making

that have an enormous individual impact

and Ben was that.

He worked for decades to try and get a replacement

for the Nuremberg Tribunals

within the United Nations General Assembly,

an international criminal court.

I was the ambassador at large for war crimes issues

during the second term of the Clinton administration.

Ben Ferencz was one hell of a lobbyist.

He reminded me of Raphael Lemkin who

you know was the father of the Genocide Convention

and spent the 1950s going up and down Capitol Hill

urging ratification of the.

Genocide Convention by the United States.

Well Ben Ferencz was there in the 1990s

pressing hard and he kept at me.

And he was persistent.

He's knocking on every delegate's door

to try and get them to support

a strong international criminal court,

and the mantra that you hear when you interview him today

is the mantra that he had back then

about the importance of justice and the rule of law.

It not only in international affairs

but in the survival of the human race.

It becomes reachable in Rome.

I made an opening statement there.

They invited me because they knew me.

I went to all the meetings, and I wrote papers.

I wrote you know hundreds and dozens of articles, speeches,

lectures, nagging and so on.

I said, "The place is here, the time is now,"

and I began it by saying, "I have come to speak

for those who cannot speak, the victims."

(applause)

Well the time is fall of 2000.

We're coming towards the end of the Clinton administration.

We have a deadline, which is December 31, 2000.

The last opportunity for any country

to sign the Rome Statute.

In the government I was working feverishly

to get President Clinton to that decision point.

But you know, it's a funny thing

about government and about presidents.

You can do an enormous amount internally

to get everything lined up and to his desk,

you know in big three ring binders

where he's going to sit down

and diligently consider this issue,

but to really trigger that man's interest

you have to have something hit him from the outside.

You just have to have it.

Well, with respect to the international criminal court,

that moment arrived not on TV.

It arrived on the op-ed page of the Washington Post

by two men, Ben Ferencz and Robert McNamara.

Narrator: Our 50 billion dollar defense program

is explained by secretary of defense McNamara.

In the past year, we've doubled the rate

of building Polaris submarines.

One day, I had a call.

My wife took the message.

She's saying secretary McNamara wanted to talk to you.

And he said I want you to write an op-ed piece

for the New York Times, which both of us can sign

calling on the United States to sign on

to the international criminal court.

Remember who these people are.

Ben Ferencz, prosecutor from Nuremberg.

Unimpeachable credentials, but who's the other guy?

Robert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War.

My response to him in practically these words

I'm sure,

"Mr. Secretary I think you realize

that if we had such a court,

you might be one of the first defendants."

He said I know that.

I said then why do you ask me

to get the United States to sign on?

He said, "I didn't know it was illegal."

we're talking the Vietnam War.

"If I had known, I wouldn't have done it."

I said, "Okay." I drafted the letter.

That was a very powerful partnership

and you bet President Bill Clinton

would read that op-ed.

And if there's anything anyone should know

about president Clinton is

he actually makes decisions at the last moment.

He makes good decisions,

but he does wait until the last moment,

and so he did finally reach that decision early

of December 31st and I was authorized then

to go to New York and sign the treaty.

Well on December 30th I receive a call

instructing me to get a train ticket

for the next morning on Amtrak so that I'm in New York,

and it happened to be a huge snowstorm

but they said, "The President has not made a decision yet,

but we want you on that train,"

because there were no flights.

The weather was preventing that.

"You'll receive instructions when you arrive in New York,"

and I finally got to Penn Station

and I still had not received the final instruction.

I'm riding up the escalator at Penn Station

and I receive a call from the Secretary of State,

Madeleine Albright, my boss.

She informed me that the president had made the decision

that the treaty would be signed

and that I had authority now

to proceed to the United Nations to sign the document.

New York City was completely covered by snow.

There were no taxis running, and so I had my snow boots on

and I hiked from Penn Station to the United Nations.

The UN had to open just for me

to walk in and sign the treaty,

because it was closed that day.

It was New Year's Eve.

They close at the UN.

And I walked in to the room where treaties are signed,

and there was a very small group of people to witness it.

Very interesting.

The last official act of the President of the United States

when is everybody sound asleep

and he has his ambassador go sneak in there

and sign the goddamn thing.

(cheering)

Unfortunately what George W. Bush did

was that he said, "with respect to that

signature on the treaty, we're no longer

going to perform our obligation as a signatory state."

So that was the downslide after the

Clinton administration, much to my regret.

And that's the political process.

Or as Churchill's reported to have said,

"It's a terrible system, but he can't think of a better one."

(gentle piano music)

When we started this, every time we met with a UN leader

or a government they said "We'll work on this

but it'll never happen, not in your lifetime,

not in your children's lifetime,"

and less than four years later we had a treaty.

Then we were told the treaty would take 20, 25 years

like the law of the sea to get 60 ratification.

Again, four years later we had that.

It is simply not plausible anymore to argue

that any political or military leader

who is responsible for the commission of atrocity crimes

has the right to get away with it.

Nuremberg started that process.

We got detracted by the Cold War.

The Cold War ended, we regenerated the process

in order to hold these individuals responsible

and to send a loud and clear signal

you are subject to criminal law, period

and you cannot negotiate your way out of it.

May it please your honors,

this is a historic moment in the evolution

of international criminal law.

For the first time a permanent international criminal court

will hear the closing statement for the prosecution

and it concludes its first case

against its first accused, Mr. Thomas Lubanga Dyilo.

When the court finally gets its first case,

they asked me to do the closing statement I'm 92 years old.

This is against a guy who had been using child soldiers.

They go and say, "You give us food, give us money,"

and if you have no money to give them and no food

they go, "Oh you got a couple of kids, we'll take the kids,"

and they were taking kids 13, 14

and the boys they taught 'em how to use a gun.

The kids loved the excitement of that,

and they taught 'em how to kill

and that happens to be a war crime.

When the statute that binds this court

was overwhelmingly approved,

over 100 sovereign states decided

that child recruitment and forcing them

to participate in hostilities were

and I'm quoting now from the statute,

"among the most serious crimes of concern"

"for the international community as a whole."

This was the first ICC case,

and I believe that it was only fitting

that from Nuremberg, Ben Ferencz, to the Hague,

it was only fitting that he would be called

to do the closing remarks of this historic case.

What makes this court so distinctive

is its primary goal to deter crimes before they take place

by letting wrongdoers know in advance

that they will be called to account

by an impartial international criminal court.

It's not an easy feat to create an institution like this.

It requires courage, it requires leadership,

it requires the right moment in historical perspective.

It requires political will.

Without Ben, his contribution and people like him,

this field will not have evolved the way it already has.

We still have a long way to go,

but it's still an incredible achievement.

Ben has played a critical role in the evolution

of international criminal justice

and in the creation of the ICC.

Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court

is one of the strongest if not the strongest

international law treaty since the end of World War II.

You now have an institution in the Hague

to hold individuals, no matter who they are,

responsible for committing these worst crimes.

And that's something to continue to be very positive about

and to do everything you can to make it work.

But the job is not done.

Now we need to persuade the other states

to be part of this, this ICC.

The United States has signed the Rome Statute

and the signature is still there.

The problem is, we are not a ratified party

to the Rome Statute.

You know this is part of a much larger picture in America.

We often describe ourselves as the exceptional nation.

We discipline ourselves, but we're not eager

to have any international regime

with supreme authority discipline us.

The attitude is, "Well the United States does this already",

or the United States Constitution

already has these protections in it.

Why should we sacrifice any of that

"to an international regime of any character?"

Why, because we're the exceptional nation.

We will meet all of these standards,

but we meet them on our terms, not on the terms

being dictated from an international body.

From the outset, the United States was concerned that

maybe it wouldn't always be objective.

That since we were doing a lot of the peacekeeping

and the intervening, maybe we'd be held

specifically specially accountable

by rival powers who were on the other side,

either overtly or covertly.

And so we couldn't go along.

U.S. policy makers will say it's fine for the Belgians

and the Brazilians, but we're the greatest country on Earth.

We don't need to be subject to the same law

that applies to everyone else.

And that's true for Russia, it's true for China,

it's true for Pakistan and India and Israel and Indonesia.

And most of the Arab world, and we're just not there yet.

There are 124 countries that have joined

the International Criminal Court.

That's unfortunate.

It's a loss in credibility

in terms of US policy when these crimes

arise anywhere in the world.

No country which prefers to use its power

rather than the rule of law would vote for the rule of law.

That's logical.

That's still the situation today.

There are some people who do not trust the rule of law,

and they prefer to use military power to achieve their goals

as they decide and when they decide they should.

That's led by the United States

to which China replies, when you're ready to change

and give it up, come see me.

We'll talk about it then and the Russians say

we're not trusting you.

We don't trust anybody.

So we have this political tension

still exists in the world

and they're still talking about using weaponry

to settle their disputes, not seeming to realize

how very devastating and dangerous that is to themselves

and to their people.

It's decisive.

War will make mass murderers out of otherwise decent people

and I have seen it again and again and again.

And it's inevitable.

They become mass murderers whether they are Americans,

or they're Germans, or anybody else.

That's the effect of war.

My answer to that is stop war making.

Well, how are you gonna stop war making?

It's been glorified for centuries.

Yes, it has been glorified.

It's time to stop before you kill everybody

and we're on that path too, so you gotta make up your mind.

Either you're going to try to behave

in a humane and rational way,

or you're going to kill everybody.

Goodbye kids, I'm 95 years, 98 years old.

Not my world.

That's my message.

From the examples that Ben has given all of us,

he has never wavered, never.

He believes that we can achieve justice for humanity.

This is one person, you know.

One great man in history

who continues to give his best.

Who continues to show his commitment.

Who continues to show that this world can be better.

I don't think a personal legacy is important to him.

I think it is important to him that we advance

the rule of law, advance the ball for all humankind

to diminish suffering.

Ben: Good afternoon young lady.

Ben's presence

and his tireless efforts are still needed

in reminding us of Nuremberg and a good thing

that was started there to be continued today

and to be brought into these new institutions.

Think this is what keeps him going, keeps him young.

You know he's very committed to this idea

that law as you know is better than war.

I work incredible hours.

I work starting sometimes seven o'clock in the morning

'til 10 o'clock at night.

I don't know what a holiday is.

I don't know what retirement means.

I have no desire to go play golf

or to go fishing, things that normal people do

when they retire.

I mean if all he had done was argue at the age of 27

in front of the Nuremberg Tribunal,

I would've said that's a remarkable person.

To go on and use that as the fire that ignites his soul

and his brain on behalf of humanity

is what makes him an iconic figure,

and the reason it's iconic is because he never forgot

what he saw and heard, and he's used it to make it better

not for him, for everybody else

so he's a conscience.

He's a roving conscience that says to people,

"This isn't right.

You can't do this.

This is wrong."

I consider myself very fortunate to have been able to

go from rags to riches,

to have been married to a woman

with whom I have never had a quarrel

and she's 98 years old.

We've been married for over 71 years.

I have survived the battles of war.

So life has been good to me.

And I have no

wish other than to serve the United States and the world

by trying to make it a more humane and peaceful world order.

That's my goal in life.

(gentle piano music)