Advice From The Last Living Prosecutor Of The Nuremberg Trials

On the 80th anniversary of the 'Night of Broken Glass,' Foreign Policy talks to Benjamin Ferencz, the last living prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials.

Ferencz, a 27-year-old prosecutor at the time of the trials, is the subject of a new documentary directed by Barry Avrich, called Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz.

Born in Romania and educated in Harvard, Ferencz had no experience in prosecuting a case before becoming one of the leading prosecutors in the most decisive trial for International Human Rights Law.

As a student, he worked as a researcher to make extra money, and pretty soon he was transferred to a war crimes investigation unit within the US Army.

His job was to rush to the scene of the crime to collect evidence. Initially, there were mostly 'flying cases,' until they started to run into the concentration camps.

"There are some strange-looking people wearing pajamas."

Those were the first reports they received. Ferencz would rush again to investigate the scene.

It was unclear who the victims were. Ferencz didn't mind. "They were human beings." To manage the horror, he would focus on his job: to find evidence of who did it.

A prisoner took the tremendous risk of hiding inmates' ID cards. He saved the documents, hoping sometime there would be a day of reckoning. That day arrived with the Nuremberg trials.

Ferencz recalls the first days of the trial and some of the conversations with Nazis afterwards. He also tells a story worth remembering today: of an SS General who claimed that they acted in self-defense. "Hitler told us they were planning to attack, and I, as a patriotic loyal German, believed him, and did what I had to do."

An engaging and different account of the Holocaust, and a highly necessary reflection on the atrocities of war and what leads up to it.

"War is such a terrible thing, that I cannot believe that people are so stupid as to continue it. Haven't they suffered enough already?"