KNOW NOW:
War and Accountability
Ben Ferencz Lives for Justice
This is Ben Ferencz, diminutive in height, soaring in stature among global jurists. No one has worked longer to replace war with the rule of law. No one has done more to hold perpetrators accountable for mass atrocities.
With a career that has so far spanned nine different decades, Ferencz’s goal has always been a binding world tribunal whose very authority would be a deterrent to deadly conflict. He has yet to live that reality, and the globe continues to be riddled with intra- and cross-border massacres – from the Guatemalan highlands where femicide goes unchecked to the Rwanda-Congolese border where child soldiers rip open old war scars.
At 103 years old, Ferencz has seen a lot of fallout, but he was among the very first to document the kind of human obliteration soon known as the Holocaust. Today, the attorney, author and activist is celebrated as the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg Tribunal. He cut his teeth as a US army researcher detailing war atrocities at six newly liberated Nazi concentration camps, collecting the first critical evidence presented to a court of law.
Since those post-war days, more than 250 cross-border, ethnic religious and civil wars have erupted where mass killings have been a risk or a reality. As culprits, governments versus organizations are relatively easy to assess, if not influence. War crimes investigators work in real time in Syria during Assad’s attacks on his people, for example, and they do so in Ukraine as Russia crushes civilian life there. Ferencz lashes countries for making murderous land grabs, and he publicly challenges Russia, specifically, to replace war with law. If that seems ambitious, far greater is the challenge of documenting and bringing to justice the growing number of organized rebels, vigilantes, militias and other “non-official” forces that kill with impunity.
Ferencz is always anxious to talk about his life’s work. “It’s very simple,” he says with a boyish smile. “I want to stop war.” For a man measuring five feet five inches, making enormous strides, this somehow sounds more plausible than ridiculous.
Dapper today in a pinstripe suit and a Greek Fisherman’s cap, Ferencz cut quite a fine figure back in the late 1940s as a young law school grad suddenly serving as the chief United States prosecutor. Dispatched to Nuremberg for the 1948 Einsatzgruppen trial, he detailed how 22 Nazi SS paramilitary death squad members murdered one million people. Nazi death squads systematically moved through every hamlet and village, lining up Jews, Roma, Soviet intellectuals, and communists, to shoot them in front of freshly dug trenches. To save ammunition and prolong the agony, the Einsatzgrupen used one bullet per person. If the bullet missed or only grazed the victim, the survivors were buried alive and suffocated to death. Abundant eyewitness accounts detail the huge piles of earth that moved and emitted sounds after the SS men departed for their next killing field.
Known as the biggest murder trial in history, Nuremberg’s Einsatzgruppen ended in the conviction of all 22 defendants. It was Ben Ferencz’s first case.
The US Government quickly moved Ferencz to Berlin where he led a 50-person team poring over Nazi war evidence and documents, identifying the distinct roles of German medical professionals, lawyer and judges, and industrialists in genocide.
The Nazi war machine was a terror the Jewish Ferencz family escaped. Born in Transylvania’s thatched hut village of Czold, his family emigrated to the US when he was a baby. Twenty years later, he entered Harvard Law School on a full scholarship. “There was no such thing as human rights law,” he quips, adding “I knew the man who invented it, René Cassin. He won a Nobel Prize for that. And the crime of genocide? That didn’t exist. I knew Raphael Lemkin, the man who came up with that.”
It’s clear that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is how Ferencz envisions prosecuting crimes against humanity, in his words “a worldwide legal body that can impose the rule of law wherever it is violated. In the US, Israel, China, wherever.” What remains uncomfortably unclear is, with non-state conflict surging – including gangs that control entire countries – just how much authority does the ICC have? This, especially when among nation states, the most important won’t commit: the US still refuses to be legally bound by the Court, a major irritant to Ferencz.
Undaunted, Ferencz charges on, fueled by new programs he recently started with his life savings. “We lived quite modestly,” he explains, and his needs are few; he outlived his wife of seventy-plus years and their children are grown. This frees him to invest in advocacy. “Millions,” he says, leaning in with obvious pride. His single message? “That the rule of law can replace war in conflict resolution, that the rule of law can be a deterrent to another Holocaust!” he snaps back impatiently. He unzips a tattered travel bag to fetch some documents to share. “I don’t have time to get old, to get sick, or even to die.”
Before zipping up the bag, he peers through his glasses with his bright steel blue eyes, and turns his mouth up at the sides : “A man can make a difference, you know.”
DO NOW:
As Ferencz demonstrated better than anyone, documentation is the essential foundation for accountability. For a gritty, sobering mix of research and humanity, see the work of French Priest Father Patrick Desbois. Want to brush up on history, including the Nuremberg trials? Here’s a case study/narrative about how an international tribunal recently functioned in Cambodia. For genocide prevention projects to professionalize or personalize, visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. For policy level issues, visit the United States Institute of Peace.
Amy Kaslow
Senior Researcher: Anna-Kate Pittman