MICHAEL JENNINGS Benjamin Ferencz, a
prosecutor for the Nuremberg Trials against high-level Nazi
officers, spoke at the UCLA School of Law Tuesday.
By Leo Wallach
Daily Bruin Contributor
Nuremberg Trial Prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz still remembers
looking into the eyes of the Nazi war criminals he helped sentence
to death.
In remarks given Tuesday night at UCLA Law School, Ferencz
recalled close encounters with the 20th century’s most
infamous killers. He said he never spoke to any of the defendants
until the verdicts were handed down. So damning were the
Germans’ own documents that Ferencz closed his case in two
days without calling a single witness and convicted all 22
defendants.
One such document, which reported the deaths of 733 Jews at a
civilian prisoner camp in Belarus, read:
“All the persons executed were absolutely inferior
elements with a predominant mixture of Asiatic blood. No
responsibility could be assumed if they were left in the occupied
zone.”
After the Military Tribunal handed down 13 death sentences,
Ferencz went to see one of the condemned, Otto Ohlendorf, whose
“special action” group killed 90,000 Jews and members
of other ethnic minorities in the Ukraine. Ferencz asked if there
was anything he might do for Ohlendorf, now that all was said and
done. The response was chilling.
“The Jews in America will suffer for what you’ve
done,” replied the condemned man.
Ferencz resurrected this and other haunting memories during an
interview co-sponsored by the UCLA School of Law and the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience
and conducted by Joan Ringelheim, the museum’s director of
oral history.
Ferencz, who immigrated to the United States as a child,
graduated from Harvard Law School and enlisted to fight in World
War II. As an artilleryman under Gen. George Patton, Ferencz fought
in the invasion of Europe. As Allied forces poured east into German
territory, Ferencz was given the assignment of gathering evidence
from the liberated concentration camps.
The burnt bodies, abandoned infants and retribution killings by
camp survivors left permanent mental and emotional scars. He
remembered with particular horror an elderly woman reduced
practically to a skeleton. He saw her dead body carried off the
next day. Ferencz said that his trauma has been a driving force in
a lifetime devoted to world peace.
First-hand experience in the camps landed Ferencz the job of
chief prosecutor, at the age of 27, in the second phase of what he
called “the biggest murder trial of all time.”
The Nuremberg Trials, which took place in several phases during
1945 and 1946, were convened by the victorious Allies as a way to
punish high-level Nazi war criminals and to expose their atrocities
to the world.
Dean of the of the Law School, Jonathan D. Varat, who introduced
Ferencz, summed up the high stakes of the trial.
“The question was the rule of law or the rule of
might,” he said
In his now famous opening remarks, Ferencz told the tribunal why
the Nazi defendants must be held accountable for their actions.
“Death was their tool and life their toy,” he said.
“If these men are immune, then the law has lost its meaning
and man must live in fear.”
In winning the convictions Ferencz helped set important
principles in international law.
The Nazis claimed they were exempt from prosecution because,
under existing international law, only nations could be held
responsible for war crimes. Any attempt to try them under a new
standard, they claimed, would mean they were being charged ex post
facto, meaning the law under which they were convicted did not
exist at the time they committed the crime.
The tribunal rejected the Nazis’ claims and held that
individuals were responsible for their actions in wartime.
At the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trails Ferencz headed efforts
to give restitution to Holocaust survivors. He succeeded in
garnering $100 billion in reparations by the time he left Germany,
but today admits that his efforts, in some respects, came too
late.
“How do you compensate for fear? How do you compensate for
grief? How do you measure that?” he asked the crowd.
Ferencz laments that genocide, like that he prosecuted at
Nuremberg, continues today unabated and unpunished. He pointed to
Rwanda where an estimated 800,000 died in ethnic violence with
virtually no international intervention.
“Where was Nuremberg? Where were the principles?
Forgotten,” he said.
One answer to atrocities and international inaction, according
to Ferencz, is the establishment of a permanent international court
to replace the ad hoc system used at Nuremberg and today in the
former Yugoslavia under which tribunals are convened when deemed
necessary.
This system, according to critics, results in tribunals being
called only under favorable political winds.
Ferencz sharply criticized U.S. objections to the establishment
of an international court. At a 1998 meeting in Rome, the United
States was one of only seven countries that voted against the
establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
At present, 139 countries have signed to establish the
court.
U.S. lawmakers have objected to the idea that American
servicemen should be subjected to outside jurisdiction. The U.S.
House of Representatives recently passed by a wide majority the
American Service Members Protection Act, an amendment to the State
Department Authorization Bill designed to protect American soldiers
from prosecution by the ICC.
“We simply cannot allow American soldiers to fall under
the jurisdiction of the ICC. Under its terms, Americans could
be brought before the court and tried without important
rights,” said majority whip and amendment sponsor Tom DeLay,
R-Texas.
DeLay also told house members that the ICC would persecute U.S.
servicemen for political reasons, citing the recent expulsion of
the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Commission
as evidence of “fickle” U.N. policy. The amendment must
now be ratified in the Senate.
Ferencz argued that the expulsion from the Human Rights
Commission is evidence of exasperation in the international
community toward U.S. policies. Ferencz also said that those in
favor of compliance with the ICC face an uphill battle against
American public opinion which is likely to reject international
authority.
Ferencz, now an author and professor of law at Pace University,
said that, despite judicial bodies, atrocities in wartime are
inevitable. The real goal, he said, was to change the institutions,
traditions and mind sets which allow war to take place.
“If you want to avoid war crimes,” said Ferencz,
“you must avoid war.”