Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Zainab Bedawi.

As a 27-year-old, Ben Ferens, who died last week, aged 103,

prosecuted the Einzatz Group and Trial of Nazi War criminals

responsible for the death of more than a million people.

Ben Ferens also helped liberate the death camps of Europe when he was

serving in the US military. In 2017, I travelled to meet him at his home in Florida and I asked

him whether he believed the Nuremberg trials had made genocide and crimes against humanity less

likely to be committed in the world today.

Ben Ferens in Florida, welcome to Hard Talk. You were born in 1920 in Transylvania in central Europe.

You moved to the United States with your family when you were a little baby. You really epitomise

the American dream, a kind of rags to riches story, because it was

discovered that you were highly intelligent and you were put on a fast track to Harvard Law School.

We arrived in America. My parents were young immigrants fleeing persecution and poverty, no money, no skills, no language. And lucky to have some

friendly New Yorker offer us, my father, who had been trained as a shoemaker, but they didn't

need any boots made in New York, but there were no cowboys. But the owner of a building

offered us the opportunity

to sleep in the cellar, and my father would be the janica. And that's where we began. And that's

where my memory begins in a high crime density area, known for good reason, as Hell's Kitchen.

There was a lot of crime there. Is that what excited your interest in law and pursuing a career in law?

Well, it did excite my interest in not being on the criminal side. I mean, put it that way,

there was crime all around. And I had made up my mind early that I didn't want to be a cowboy

and I didn't want to be a fireman, I didn't want to be a crook either.

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