Please Listen to Benjamin Ferencz, the Last Nuremberg Prosecutor, Explain His Implacable Opposition to War

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Please Listen to Benjamin Ferencz, the Last Nuremberg Prosecutor, Explain His Implacable Opposition to War

[image error]So the sabre-rattling in the West has begun yet again, cruelly and idiotically calling for more bombing in Syria, one of the most devastated countries in the world, in response to the recent terrorist attacks in Paris — even though the terrorists were European citizens, and even though the ongoing war in Syria has, to date, created a refugee crisis unprecedented in modern history. In response, I’m hoping that anyone interested in peace — and in understanding the true horrors of war — will find the time to listen to a profoundly enlightening interview I came across by chance last Friday, on the 70th anniversary of the day the Nuremberg trials began.

On BBC Radio 4, the PM programme interviewed Benjamin Ferencz, 95, the last surviving prosecutor from the trials, who was just 27 years old when, in 1947, he became the Chief Prosecutor in the ninth of the twelve Nuremberg trials, of 24 officers of the Einsatzgruppen, mobile SS death squads, who operated behind the front line in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe. and who, from 1941 to 1943 alone, murdered more than one million Jews and tens of thousands of other people, including gypsies and the disabled.

Ferencz’s testimony about what he witnessed at the liberation of the Nazis’ death camps, and his experience of the trials — and his subsequent conviction that he had to devote his life to peace — ought to be required listening for everyone, from our politicians to every single one of our fellow citizens.

As he explained in his book PlanetHood: The Key to Your Future, co-written with Ken Keyes, Jr. and published in 1988, “Indelibly seared into my memory are the scenes I witnessed while liberating these centers of death and destruction. Camps like Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Dachau are vividly imprinted in my mind’s eye. Even today, when I close my eyes, I witness a deadly vision I can never forget — the crematoria aglow with the fire of burning flesh, the mounds of emaciated corpses stacked like cordwood waiting to be burned … I had peered into Hell.”

Through his writings from the 1970s onwards, Ferencz was instrumental in establishing the International Criminal Court, and is hugely critical of the US refusal to ratify the treaty establishing the ICC, when it finally became a reality in 2002.

The 12-minute BBC interview with Ferencz is available here, and will hopefully remain available on the BBC’s website. He has, as he says, spent his life “trying to create a more humane world, a world where the illegal use of armed force will be recognized as a crime against humanity,” and he spoke about the death camps, the trials, and the lack of remorse of those who had been responsible for the murder of a million people, mostly Jews. His recollections are extremely powerful, and not diminished by some inappropriate questions by the presenter.

Towards the end of the interview, Ferencz says, “I know the horrors of war, and you have to eliminate war if you want to eliminate the horrors and the rape and all the other crimes that go with war. Now many people would think that I’m crazy for trying to stop war, but ask yourself whether the man who is trying to stop war is crazy or the people who send people out, every day now, in all parts of the world, to kill other people they don’t know, and to drop bombs from drones and other things, knowing that innocent people will certainly die in that process. Who is crazy? Who is a murderer here? Let them be tried in the court of public opinion, which is the ultimate court.”

Below is an excerpt from the interview, on YouTube, about the death camps, illustrated with devastatingly powerful footage from the time. It was clips like this that I saw on “The World at War” as a 10-year old, which made me a lifelong pacifist, and I wish I could say that it had the same impression on others, enough to bring wars to an end; instead, of course, the last 14 years have seen untold bloodshed, and from Afghanistan to Iraq, and from Libya to Syria, the involvement of the West in creating these horrors has, shamefully, been immense.

If you share my views, and if you haven’t already done so, please do something to mark your opposition to the current round of warmongering. In the UK, there is a petition to the UK government opposing airstrikes on Syria, which currently has over 20,000 signatures, and a Care2 petition that currently has over 33,000 signatures, and that enables signatories to write to their MPs — and you can also write to your MP here, to ask them to vote against airstrikes.

There are also protests in London, and across the country, taking place on Saturday.

Note: Also see this article on Benjamin Ferencz from the Atlantic in 2014.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign, the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).