Prosecuting Evil (2018) Movie Script
[dramatic music]
[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.
At 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.
They don't-- 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 the garbage pile
digging, crawling
for a bite to eat.
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.
[Safferling]
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.
[Ben] 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.
[man] 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 almost unseen nature.
[Ben] 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.
[Scheffer] 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.
[Ben] 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.
[Abella] 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."
[Ben] 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]
[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.
At 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.
They don't-- 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 the garbage pile
digging, crawling
for a bite to eat.
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.
[Safferling]
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.
[Ben] 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.
[man] 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 almost unseen nature.
[Ben] 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.
[Scheffer] 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.
[Ben] 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.
[Abella] 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."
[Ben] 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]