RE-RUN: The Last Nuremberg Prosecutor

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

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4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2023

⏱️ 23 minutes

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Summary

102 year old Ben Ferencz is the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials and a direct witness to the horrors of the Nazi death camps. Born in Transylvania he emigrated to the United States with his family as a child to escape antisemitic persecution. He trained at Harvard Law School, graduated in 1943 and served in the US army in the campaign to liberate western Europe. In 1945 at the end of the war, he was assigned to a team charged with collecting evidence of war crimes during which he visited the death camps and saw first-hand the appalling conditions there. He then became a prosecutor during the Nuremberg war crimes trials where his work focussed on the prosecution of the Einsatzgruppen death squads. His experiences during the war have led him to be a passionate, lifelong campaigner advocating for the international rule of law and he helped found the international criminal courts in The Hague. In this episode, he shares his life experiences and how we all need to find ways to resolve our differences peacefully if we want to continue to see humanity flourish.

This interview was first released in 2021.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history at Ben Ferrenche is 102 years old. He is a national
0:09.1	treasure. He's an international treasure. And I'm rebroadcasting his interview now. We recorded
0:14.8	a couple of years ago. We thought at the time we had to really scramble to do it because
0:18.1	he was well, 100 years old, but he's now 102 and he's absolutely cruising. He's in great
0:23.5	shape. He was just awarded the congressional gold medal in 2023. He's back in the news
0:30.1	and we wanted to share this extraordinary interview we did with him a while back. He's
0:35.0	one of the most memorable interviews I've ever had in this podcast. If you didn't hear
0:38.7	at the time, then you're in luck. If you did, well, you might want to revisit it because
0:42.5	he is the last surviving prosecutor of the Neuron Bird Trials. I don't know. He directly
0:47.9	witnessed the horrors of the Nazi death camps. He had an extraordinary life. He was born
0:52.5	in Transylvania. He escaped to the US. Very lucky to escape in the 1930s. The US to avoid
0:59.5	anti-Semitic persecution that coming of the Holocaust. And he then threw extraordinary
1:05.0	natural ability, hard work, ambition. He won a scholarship to Harvard Law School and ended
1:11.5	up as a hugely important lawyer. Actually, during the Second World War, he served. He was
1:16.5	in General Patons III Army and he was tasked with noting down war crimes, investigating
1:22.1	war crimes. And he actually visited concentration camps that have been liberated by the US Army.
1:27.0	So he had a hugely relevant experience of his time in the Army. And in Christmas 1945, when
1:31.6	they were looking to staff up for the Neuron Bird Trials, he was invited to participate
1:36.9	as a prosecutor. His first case, the first case he ever prosecuted was 24 defendants,
1:46.4	and the gang members of the Einsatzgruppen units, units of the SS, death squad, execution
1:52.4	squad, who went around Nazi occupies near just murdering people, millions of people, around
1:58.8	two million people, in fact. And young Ben French, in his mid-20s, found himself prosecuting
	...

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