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Criminal

Episode 97: Palace of Justice

Criminal

Vox Media Podcast Network

True Crime, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.738.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 August 2018

⏱️ 26 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

When Benjamin Ferencz was 27 years old, he prosecuted his very first trial. There were 22 defendants, each of them high-ranking members of Nazi Germany's death squad. The entire world was watching. Today, we take a look at the Nuremberg trials and their role in defining international law after World War II. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Greetings to you all. My name is Benjamin Forens and I'm being interviewed in Delray Beach, Florida.

0:10.0

We'll either request to give you an outline of what I've been doing with my life and some things which may be of interest and hopefully will lead to a more humane and better world.

0:22.0

I met Benjamin Forens at his home. We sat side by side into computer chairs at his desk and if I had any idea that I was going to be the one leading the conversation, I quickly learned I was wrong.

0:35.0

Where did I get these peculiar ideas? Well, I was born 99 years ago in a little village in Transylvania.

0:44.0

Now I know that most of you have never heard of Transylvania, although you have some connection with my uncle Dracula. Of course there is no such uncle, but there was a Transylvania.

0:55.0

Everything about him seems much younger than his 99 years. Part of that might be because of his morning routine.

1:03.0

I wake up usually about 7 o'clock in the morning. The first thing I do is a physical routine. Before I get out of bed, I raise my feet and I wiggle my toes and I turn my legs around and circles and do that for quite a bit.

1:21.0

Then I do 25 sit-ups and then I get out of bed. Then after some toiletries I go to another room. I breathe the air, open the door, take deep breathing.

1:37.0

25 times in and out while I bend over and do other things, waving my hands around. Then I do the world's famous world famous.

1:45.0

125 push-ups. And then I close my eyes. I was swimming.

1:53.0

I've never met anybody like him. He has a wild sense of humor that I wasn't expecting from someone who's had such a serious career.

2:02.0

Benjamin Friends is a last surviving prosecutor of what's been called the largest murder trial in history. A trial with more than a million victims.

2:13.0

I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal.

2:27.0

My sister was born in the same bed that I was born in a half earlier.

2:32.0

The one thing we had in common with it, whatever it was called, home we all remain. It was that they persecuted the Jews and there were no work for them.

2:42.0

So my parents decided after they had two little babies to take up the babies and look for a better place to live.

2:52.0

We sailed away on a ship across the Atlantic to New York in December of 1921.

3:00.0

We traveled to third class because there was no fourth class. We arrived in New York, combo with no money, no friends, no language, no skills.

3:12.0

Let me skip along because it's been a long life.

3:16.0

Benjamin Friends was admitted to a New York City high school for gifted students and went on to enter Harvard Law School.

3:23.0

Then the war broke out while I was at school in Japan, attacking the United States. Everybody that I knew went down to enlist, I went to.

3:32.0

He wanted to work in intelligence, but he wasn't eligible because he was an immigrant.

...

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