 Ladies and gentlemen, a good day to you. I'm Zaid Raad Al-Hussain, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Today, with the distinct privilege of interviewing a friend, an inspiration, a teacher, Ben Ferenc, who is known very well to all of the international criminal lawyers who are applying their trade to bring justice to victims. Ben, as many of you know, was the chief prosecutor of the Einsatzgruppen case, and he succeeded in convicting all 22 defendants brought before the Nuremberg Tribunal. He also devoted the early part of his life to supporting the victims of those enormous and colossal atrocities visited upon the Jewish nationals of Europe, but not just them, the Roma, and others who had suffered at the hands of the Nazis. And in subsequent years led a campaign for the creation of an international criminal court, and that's when I had the honor of meeting him many years ago. So, Ben, welcome, and thank you for agreeing to this interview. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the honor of being able to sit next to the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Thank you, Ben. And to be given such a warm welcome. Thank you, Ben. So, can I begin, first of all, by stating the reasons for this interview, go back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We will be celebrating its 70th anniversary in December, along with the 70th anniversary of the adoption of the Genocide Convention the day before the Universal Declaration was adopted. I was up in Hyde Park with my children back in the summer, and I visited the FDR home, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt's home up there. And in the museum I saw a copy of the Universal Declaration, and it was the Cassin Draft. And what struck me, Ben, is the first line. The first line of that draft of the Universal Declaration was stark. And it said, ignorance and contempt of human rights have been the principle or among the principle causes of sufferings of humanity. You knew Cassin. The Universal Declaration is often portrayed as an aspirational, idealistic document. But like you, Cassin had experienced war firsthand. What do you remember about him? And do you think that this view of the world, that if you reject human rights, you open up the possibility of much wrongdoing beginning with war, which you have spent most of your life, if not all of your life, fighting against? Well, thank you very much for the question. It's quite comprehensive. By coincidence, not coincidence, I always carry with me what I have now in my pocket, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I have it in my bag, which I'm sitting on, together with the United States Constitution. And the United Nations Charter. And those have been my guides. And I recognized immediately that the original draft is not in the final text. Exactly. But now to answer your questions. René Cassin was a visionary. He had experienced the war. He knew the horrors of war. As a decent human being, he recognized the need for universal principles because the World War covered many countries, but not the whole universe. And we are all members of one small planet. And we should deal with the problems in a planetary sense. I wrote a little booklet with that title, Planethood. No longer thinking in terms of neighborhood or nationhood, but thinking in terms of we are all inhabitants of one planet. So he grasped that. Then of course listing all the various rights takes a book. And of course some of them are a little bit ambiguous in just general principles. But it's a crying out for what I now call prohibition of crimes against humanity. It's an appeal of humanity to law. And I used that phrase. And I was inspired by people like René Cassin who were following those guidelines. And they were realists, but they were also very aware of the horrors of war, having experienced it as a witness or as a victim. And so they were able to feel deeply about that. And I very much regret that this Universal Declaration of Human Rights, unfortunately, is being violated in more of the principles than it's being accepted. Yes. You're absolutely right. The text that I quoted was redrafted and became the second paragraph of the preamble. What strikes me, of course, is when you look at the world today, sadly, alas, notwithstanding everything we've tried to achieve that you've devoted your life to, we still see some terrible crimes being committed in northern Rakhine and Myanmar, what we've seen in Syria, what we've seen in other parts of the world, in Libya and Yemen, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And is this not a validation of the view that ignorance and contempt of human rights provides, then, for wrongdoing on a massive scale? And if we can only have a recognition that we as humans, as you said, planet Earth, that we belong to one team, team human beings, that only if we have this vision can we keep the world safe. But the idea put forward by the President of the United States, but not just him, others, that there is a first, America first, these chauvinistic nationalisms, sort of in one way betrays the sense that we all have universal rights that ought to be respected by all governments. Well, you have touched upon the crucial problem facing humankind today, and that is the conflict between what you've expressed here as human rights and the glorification of non-human rights, the glorification of war-making. What we are trying to do is to reverse something which has been glorified for centuries, centuries, ever since little David collided the head with a rock and became the king thereby. If that were all the condition of the world today, I wouldn't object, somebody in the head with a rock, but it's even worse than your characterization because the capacity to kill human beings has grown faster than our capacity to meet their urgent and vital and justified needs. So we stand on the verge of having used nuclear weapons which are now obsolete because we're in cyberspace. And from cyberspace, I have it on very reliable authority, secret message to me by American General 15 years ago, so I can talk about it now, we have the capacity to cut off the electrical grid on planet Earth. Imagine what this planet would look like if somebody in cyberspace turns their head and says, no more Washington D.C. All the lights go out, the hospitals stop working, the water stops flowing, no traffic lights, everything stops. How long would it take? And I asked this general who was confiding this to me many years ago, how long would it take for everybody to die? And he said, well, I'm not aware of any studies to that effect, but I assume that it would depend upon how much water they had. If they had water, they could probably live for about a week. If they didn't have water, then of course it would be much shorter, of course. So there it was, an awareness that we have the capacity to kill everybody on this planet and become like all the other billions of planets, lifeless in space. We have the capacity, man to create it. Don't we have the capacity to stop it and to stop creating it? That's the issue. That's right. There's this odd paradox, isn't there, where the more the world relies on technology, the closer we bring ourselves to that very possibility that if used malevolently, we return ourselves to the stone age and worse, as you said, to human extinction essentially. There are other returns to the stone age. I recently read the position of the United States, the strategic position of the United States with regard to war and peace, and was signed by the Secretary of Defense, but it's more come true for the country. And there were two major points which struck me in that I only read the 20-page summary. The process itself is much longer, but I got the point. The main point was, make sure we have enough budget to cover the needs of the Pentagon. That's point number two. And the second one struck me as being most interesting. He said also we have to be sure to win the war. I paused when I read that, and it appeared at least four or five times in the report. I said to my, win the war? What do you win? Who wins the war? Does it mean you kill everybody else? You kill millions of people and you say we won, including millions of our own, and we say we won the war, the whole concept. And this is the Secretary of Defense. I'm sure he's a very fine gentleman. He served in the Marines all of his life. He was trained to think we have to put in the budget and win the war. And he's a noble hero. He is the Secretary of Defense, our highest ranking officer. And he speaks certainly for at least half the people in the country. So how do we turn that around? You say you cannot win a war. Everybody loses in a war. The only winner in war is death. And I have seen it in action. And they have seen it in action. Don't they see the connection? And it's getting worse and more dangerous all the time. That's why now as I'm approaching very soon my hundredth year, I'm still trying to stop that. And we're very sad because it'll take a long time. But you now have gone to the heart of the issue that intelligent people, intelligent human beings can rationalize actions and policies which would seem to be appalling in their consequences. And yet it sort of fits a certain logic. I'm always reminded, and whenever I watch Charlie Chaplin's speech in The Great Dictator at the end, and he says the world doesn't need more clever people. It needs kind people. It needs people who care, who empathetic. When you were prosecuting the 22 defendants, and perhaps you tell us why it was only 22 when there were 3,000 killers who ravaged Eastern Europe and why did you select those 22? But among them were some highly educated individuals. Otto Rush had two doctorates in law and economics. Otto Ollendorf had two degrees as well. And Paul Blobel had at least he practiced architecture. So he was a seemingly refined individual. And yet they were capable of the most heinous barbarity and Blobel, of course, Babillard and the killing of children, the 90 children, and I think it was called the Zverka. I might have to remind myself here, the Billet Zverka massacre. So how do we reconcile the fact that these are intelligent human beings that are capable of committing such outrage? You have combined several difficult questions in your presentation. The first one that struck me is how do you rationalize war-making? And I've given you the quotation from the highest officer in the United States. It's something which we have glorified for centuries. America is a great democracy. It's inevitable that there will be differences of opinion and it says it should be. And all of the opinions are entitled to respect. It doesn't mean you have to follow them or you have to agree with them if you think they're wrong. And that's the condition we have in the world today with the United States being a principal leader in the thinking and acting on these principles. It's not that the people who glorify war are evil people or stupid people. They are not. They are patriotic people carrying on what they can seem to be a great tradition and giving us the power that we have now to control the world and deal with it as we see fit. Those who are not fit to be cared for, well, just push them aside. That's a mentality which has existed in many countries. It existed in Nazi Germany, of course, where inferior people were to be exterminated, useless eaters. They called them habitual criminals and so on. So we have a basic philosophical problem. And how do you deal with that? It's deeply felt. You cannot end it by saying, I think you're wrong. Say, well, I think you're wrong. You're a dreamer. You're an idealist. You're reaching for the moon to which my reply is, haven't you heard? We'll end it on the moon. And as distant as it may seem, I think it's possible and I don't agree with those who take, let's call it the conservative view. I don't share that because I see the impact of it on the people and the impact is enormous. You're killing millions of innocent people who never did anybody any harm. The current system, current system is, if you don't agree, the heads of state don't agree. President or whoever it is doesn't agree with another one. What do they do? They send young people over to kill the other young people whom they don't even know, who may have done them no harm, who may have never harmed anybody, who live in a country you may never have heard of. And they kill each other until they get tired of killing each other. Then they pause, each side declares victory. Then they start again and they continue killing each other. And they spend all their money on improved weapons to kill more people instead of using it to meet the legitimate concerns of the people who are so distressed by their living conditions that they cry out in panic and in fear, help us and will commit all kinds of acts which we call terrorism in an effort to improve their own condition. So instead of using the funds to help them eliminate their justified complaints, we use it to create more weapons to kill more people. That is crazy, in my opinion. I may be a nut, but that is totally criminally insane. And that is the policy followed today, not only by the United States, but many of its allies and other countries. So that's the world in which we live. And you ask the question, all right, Benny Boy, how do we change that? If you want a one-word answer, it's slowly. But that's really a cop-out because there is no quick answer to it. And I am an optimist. People ask me, are you a pessimist or an optimist? I say, I am a realist. As a pessimist, I see all these legitimate complaints and they are legitimate. It's crazy what we do as I've just simplified but explained it. It's totally insane what we do. It's murderous. It's genocidal. It's suicidal. Whatever it is, it's terrible. And from there, however, I move to the realist point of view. The realist point of view is, for example, we had Nuremberg, which said law must apply equally to everyone, that aggressive war is the supreme international crime, that crimes against humanity deserve to be deterred by punishment. This was hailed by the whole world after 100 million people or 200 million people got killed. Nobody knows how many people die in wars. I've been participated in shoveling them into a ditch and how many die of heartache and how many die of disease. Nobody knows. But we had progress since those days and these are part of the faults which still exist in the system. But we do have, we had Nuremberg, we have international courts which people told me when I began work on this 70 years ago they said it'll never happen, Ben. It'll never happen. And I said, you're probably right. But it should happen and it's right and I'm going to work for it anyway. And we've made enormous progress. I agree. Now let me give you one example of the enormous progress. Yes. You mentioned the Einsatzgruppen case. I was 27 years old. That was my first case. I'd never been in a court room before. I was 27. I worked on trying to create a permanent international court in recognition when that court got its first international case in The Hague, they called me to do the closing remarks for the prosecution. I was 92. Well, that told me several things. First of all, somebody had been listening and it's happened and it's gone forward. Second, it takes a long time. Yes. And it doesn't mean we've gotten perfect justice and a perfect court. We haven't. We have all kinds of problems. Yeah. But they're being overcome. And I see the progress. And when I see the progress, I get optimistic. No, I think, I mean, this is, you know, what you've just said, Ben, it's so important. You made me think of Isiah Berlin's short credo, the speech he gave in 1994 at the University of Toronto because he said what you were saying, he said beware of the quiet philosopher who creates a philosophical ideal and to reach that utopia, you may have to clear the path of a few obstructions, including people who opposed the idea. Of course. And he said in the speech, the search for a single overarching ideal, because it is the one and the only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction. Blood, eggs are broken, but the omelette is not in sight. There are only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And in the end, the passionate idealists forget the omelette and just go on breaking eggs. So these are people who've sort of rationalized that there is something to be attained by violence. And what you're saying is violence brings no good. And as humanity, we need to graduate to a point where war becomes unthinkable, not as a tool for achieving certain objectives, because ultimately in itself it engenders so much criminal activity that it has to be basically rendered unlawful completely. And as you said, aggression is the supreme international crime. He hasn't gotten the point. He hasn't gotten the point. I'm not just breaking eggs. I'm trying to save the planet. I'm trying to save the lives of all the people on this planet. And so our hope lies with the young people. The young people who will recognize that what I say is true and that their lives are in danger and increasing danger every day as we perfect the cyberspace weapons. We still don't know what to do with the nuclear waste because that will kill everybody by itself. And as our capacity to kill increases and our concern for human rights and human needs is brushed into second place, they got the sequence wrong. You'll never get to the second place unless you reverse the first one, get rid of it, because that's what's causing the problem. And if we took the money we spend, not only the United States but other nations, on killing machines, killing weapons, and use it to meet fundamental human rights, maternity rights, the right of a mother to feed her children, the right of a person to go to school, the right of taking care of health, taking care of old people. If we use that money for those purposes, there wouldn't be the kind of discontent which makes them determined to kill and die for their particular cause. Can I go, Ben, to another passion of yours, not just the search for justice, the end to all war, but to the protection and the justice done to victims in the form of restitution, trying to create for them a semblance of some form of reconstruction of their formal lives. One of the things that has been troubling me a great deal is that when you have a judicial process where alleged wrongdoings have been highlighted and charges have been pressed, is that in the context of the trials, when you see a defendant express no remorse, and you've spoken about this, and I wish you'd conveyed to the audience what it was like to sit with Otto Ollendorf. When you see no remorse, the victims themselves, for them the pain must be even deeper to see someone presented with all the evidence, unassailable. You concluded your arguments in two days, and yet they refuse the stubborn refusal to believe that they have done anything wrong. It must create deep pain for the victims, and I'll get to another question, I'll ask it in a few minutes. But first of all, you can convey to us what it was like to talk to him for a few minutes. And then what do you think we could do to have in place a system where people recognize they're wrongdoing? If you're a victim of the most superficial wrongdoing, you'd like to see the person say sorry, that they've done you wrong and they apologize for it. When the crimes are colossal, you really want to see that, and when it isn't forthcoming, it hurts, I would imagine. But if you could convey that... Well, I could convey that very simply, by simply giving you a viewer's, my website, my website is my name, Benference.org. Everything on it is free. You can plagiarize it, you can copy it, you can burn it if you like. And that answers, or tries to answer the question, would you pack together in such a compact pack that I don't have a way to begin? So let me begin by giving you a quick overview and see if I can remember some of the specific points. The quick overview is the outline of my life. I was born in poverty in Transylvania, which doesn't exist. My sister was born in the same bed, she's a Hungarian. I was born in the same bed, I was born in the same birth. We fled to the United States to escape poverty and persecution in Transylvania, which no longer exists. We came to the United States. We were lucky. My father, who had been trained as a shoemaker, discovered that they don't wear boots in New York. There are no cows in New York. And he was lucky to be given the opportunity to live in a cellar if he became the janitor for the house. And he became the janitor in a dungeon in Hell's Kitchen. So my life in America begins where the walls were wet because we lived under the foundation of the house. From there, I jumped quick to went to a special school. I was a gifted boy. I didn't know what a gifted boy was. I had no way of getting any gifts. When I got to City College, I applied to the Harvard Law School for some reason they accepted me. The first exam on criminal law, I got a scholarship to the Harvard Law School and finished my education. The war was already on. I was trying to get into the military service. They wouldn't take me. I was too short. In any case, eventually, I would get in as a private. I had finished my law school. I had passed my bar exam. I was assigned to the Army with all their intelligence. I had done the research for a book on war crimes. I knew all about war crimes. So they made me a private without airplanes. We did shoot down airplanes. Most of them, unfortunately, were either British or American, but we didn't hit a couple of Germans, I guess. That's my educational background. Prepare me for life to be. It starts in the Army. I see the horrors of war, but I see them up close, very close. Not only people dying in combat. I landed on the beaches of Normandy. You find bodies floating in the water in uniform. The tanks mired in the mud trying to go through. I went through the Maginot Line, the Siegfried Line. I crossed the Rhine on a pontoon bridge arriving in Jeep. Final battle of the bulge. This was all part of my life, but then toward the end of the war, as we were already occupying German-held territory, my assignment carrying out a promise made for the atrocities being committed, which were well known in the United States, and certainly in Germany as well. We promised to warn them they were going to meet trials. They didn't know how to begin. They went to this Harvard professor. I had done the research for his book, Our War Crimes. He said, find Benny. He's out there somewhere, so he's happy on the shoulder. I was there by that time promoted. They recognized my talent to a corporal. They transferred me out to the judge-advocate section, and the colonel said to me, what's a war crime? I said, sit down, I'll explain it. I was the first person in the United States to deal with war crimes in World War II. And I was it. I was the war crime's branch. Pretty soon we began to get a few others, not many. My job was to go out, first the Allied Flyers cases. The flyer had been shut down. I'd run mob on the ground. Sometimes he wasn't. He was led to the farmhouse. The soldier was away to the war. The widow or the wife was there, was led to have help. He was treated relatively well. Most of the time, the mob got on him and beat him to death. I would go out, get the people together, tell the burglar monster whatever official I could get. We had occupied the town, the area. I want to interrogate them and put them in a room. I didn't speak German then. I said, somebody speaks English. Sherman, you're the translator. Tell them. They're going to write out exactly what happened. No lies. Anybody who lies will be shot. Oh. These days, the human rights say, pen, you didn't threaten to shoot them, did you? I said, yeah, I'm shutting to shoot them. Because what am I going to tell them? I mean, I had no other weapon. I had to tell them they were going to tell the truth. I only wanted to tell the truth. I didn't shoot anybody, in fact. But I was intending to scare the hell out of them. And I did. And they sat down and they wrote. And then I knew what happened. Then I go try to catch the guy. He invariably fled, usually. But I had the witnesses and I had the evidence. And I had the bloody shirt and so on. So I prepared the dossier. I found the bodies. Finding the bodies, locating them. They had been thrown into a river, thrown into a ditch and covered over. Digging them out in the cold winter, the hard ground. Had to dig them out without coming out with just a foot and a limb. It was no fun. And I did that. And this was just the flyers. It wasn't other prisoners of war. It was essentially the down flyers. These were the down flyers. These were the victims. When I first came in and took pictures, I was so shocked when I saw them. I couldn't look at them anymore. Because I recognized my head dug them up. And it was a very grim, very grim indication of what war is like. And after that we set up military tribunal trials in the Dahu concentration camp about which very little is known. And it's just as well. Because there were quick trials. We'd take all the guards who had been caught in Buchenwald and Dahu and put them in a room like a basketball court and land them up sitting on different pages and put a number on them. Summary trials. Yes, a summary trial. You were accused of being a guarded Dahu of one of the other camps in Buchenwald where inmates were being beaten regularly and tortured and killed and murdered. What have you got to say for yourself? I was only obeying orders or I wasn't even there. I was at my grandmother's funeral. I hear it here for the first time. One of them tried that on me. And they then take them out. Three officers, a captain and two lieutenants come back in ten minutes. All the defendants found guilty and sent to death. And then they were taken to a shot. There were quite a few of those trials. The trials of the allies. There were trials of the allies. French had some such trials as well. But these are the army military trials. Which is not to do with any of them. But this is part of my experience. So I have the first thing is to end the war as our current Secretary of Defense says. We've got to end the war. The next step, what do you do then? We cut the criminals and try them. Prove what had happened. The next step, which had always been forgotten is what do you do for the victims? What happens then? And in the German instance all the Jews have been divested of their property. They could not own property. It was illegal. It was taken over by somebody else. Either a neighbor bought it or they seized it. So the next section was the restitution program. If the former owner was alive he would claim it. Or his family could claim it. So the restitution program followed logically after education and stopping the war restitution. Then also compensation for the victims themselves. Not the property owners. But for damage to their health. People who were totally disabled. They never could hold a job after that. They developed all kinds of diseases. So you have to set up a program to compensate them. How are you going to do that? Germany is totally defeated. We bombed the hell out of them. They had no bread for their inhabitants. The housing was gone. How do you do that? That was the biggest achievement of my life. I set up those programs. It was not easy. It was quite a great deal of imagination. But I operated on a very simple principle which I had learned in torts 1 in Harvard Law School. If you do an injury, a wrongful injury you have an obligation to try to make good. Either repair the injury or compensate the injury. With that principle, I built on that principle I set up restitution programs for the Nazi victims as well as legal aid societies to help them with their complicated claims to prove that they were really there and that they did so-and-so and medical reports, etc. I set all that machinery up with the staff of about a thousand people. There was the agent of a consortium of the leading Jewish organizations of the world who asked me to take on the problem first of getting back the airless and unclaimed property so we could use the proceeds for the benefit of the survivors. That seemed to me a worthwhile thing. The Nuremberg trials were over. I didn't want to stay in Germany. I had four children born in Nuremberg. People said, how did you manage that? Well, the court was often a recess. However, I stayed on and set up that program. I had a staff of over a thousand people working on that in every major office in 19 different countries around the world where the victims had fled. He asked me what would be the major achievement of my life. That was it. When I left there after doing it for about 10 years the Germans had paid out 50 billion dollars to the various partly to Israel and took the people and partly to the victims themselves and they continued to this day. There was no Nazi victim Jew and non-Jew equally. It was always the principle. It was not on a religious grounds. There is no Nazi victim who is not a beneficiary of that program. They have no idea that I was in any way connected with that and that sort of tickled me. All right, let me go on. I'm going to press you on this point then because there is a lot of preventive happening again. I'm going to swing you back to the point that I raised beforehand because your incredible efforts to provide restitution this form of thinking when we put the International Criminal Court together there was a very determined attempt to not just seek retributive justice but also have a victim's trust and to make it clear that the victims it's not just seeing justice done in terms of the perpetrator but also as you have shown in the context of the suffering of those the Jewish nationals of Europe but beyond that there had to be something else. When I recently a couple of years ago had the honor because it was for me to sit in Seoul the Republic of Korea with the victims of sexual slavery the so-called comfort women and we were talking about what would they need what are their demands to ensure that somehow their suffering can be recognized one of them said to me you have to believe me the money we are elderly now the money can go to other victims we want to see a genuine recognition of remorse and so I'm going to take you back to that because this idea that you're sitting with one of the chief architects the commander of group D Otto Ollendorf and who is just blank-faced and sitting I mean you presented all the evidence indisputable and yet no sort of recognition and I want to raise this because I think this is the part in everything that we're doing that is still missing and I think there is an answer but it may not be in the form of sort of the judicial systems that we have in place the inkling comes from an interview that Gita Serany did with Otto with Franz Stangl the second commandant of Treblinka where in 1971 he had already been convicted by a West German court and he was serving his sentence and he was never going to see the light of day again he was going to be in detention for the rest of his life and she conducted a series of interviews the last of which she decided instead of asking him questions she would let him talk and she said to him you know what have you learned from all of this and very slowly he began to recognize his guilt but there were long pauses half an hour between each answer and then he sort of said you know I am guilty and then he sort of went on to say of having lived this long in other words he got himself to the point and he should have said of having murdered millions of people but what gave away the sign that he eventually recognized is his body sagged completely and it's almost like he collapsed inside in courtrooms the world over including in the international criminal court seldom do we see this recognition this contrition which I would argue the victims need to see as well do we need to think like that and we know you have led the way in having us focus at all of these different components but do we need to because perhaps if we begin to see that we begin to sort of make those who are contemplating wrongful acts of recognizing before they were to conduct these or exercise or perpetrate these actions make them contemplate these issues in a deeper sense is there something in that way of thinking well you've raised a very profound question human guilt and recognition of it and of course I faced I dealt with that problem as well when we got through with complicated program year long problem of compensating individual victims for individual injuries as you would in insurance case that was prompted and made possible because the German Chancellor Konrad Adonauer devout Catholic made a public speech in which he said terrible crimes have been committed in the name of the German people and it imposes upon us a legal and moral obligation to try to make amends with that opening we began to sit down and negotiate with the Germans what does he mean how much who's going to pay how's he going to settle it and so we set up a small group I was counsel to the group I was a key player I was not alone but I was captain of the team most of the time and so we sat down in the Hague because we wanted neutral territory we were under careful guard by the secret police of the Germanies of the Hague of the United States and I don't know the United States anyway we were very carefully guarded because there was a terrorist group who said what are you doing you're going to sit down with the murder of my parents and negotiate about money have you no shame we'll kill you all and they set about to kill us all and that was their plan and we had a guy on the inside so we knew what was going on and that required tight security they had some measure of success about which I don't talk but it was a very tense situation and one of the leaders of this what we would now call a terrorist gang was a gentleman by the name of Manachem Begut who became the prime minister of Israel and was the Nobel Peace Prize you touch on the problem one goes through the mind of the people they won the Nobel Peace Prize for threatening to kill me because I was trying to get compensation for the victims all right that's another point but let's go on to the problem itself of compensation I have personally donated money to the victims fund I was the largest single contributor of that time I was very familiar with the negotiation for the fund they had no idea what they were doing and I was one of those people for no idea what they were doing that's complicated enormously complicated and you say look this guy has survived the camp and he gets up every night he starts to cry he does crazy things proved to us his grandfather wasn't insane you know he was that kind and then one wants to kill you for talking to him the other one he says he didn't get enough caught in between and there's no money to pay for it to invent the money we invented the money for it and I say they got $50 billion that was quite a trick my salary remained the same I couldn't feed my family on what I was earning so the $50 billion was fictitious at least initially it was a real figure because we primed the German industry every taxi in Israel but then you had the money it's available then we got the goods and you had the money we set up a system of border and trade and priming the pump in Germany and it worked out very well we didn't there publicize it because the Germans would object they say we're hungry and you're giving away money to these people you're told us we should kill so it's very complicated psychologically, physically, biologically financially we overcame those problems and that was a damn good trick, Benny I don't like to talk about it because it sounds like it mostly but anyway that was the next phase compensating the victims and never had happened in human history no victims had directly been compensated they had reparations which they usually went to the government and that didn't work very well either but to be unable to put through a claim and I can say to you and sit here that there is no Nazi victim and didn't have a right to claim except those who lived in the eastern territories if they were already in the eastern territories they cut them out which I thought was outrageous too I sneaked a couple of them in there victims of Catholic victims of medical experiments I did that with the help of the Red Cross in Geneva since you lived in Geneva they have all the records there and so I'm giving you the overall picture for us to come to your complicated question of their remorse remorse and I will give you or lack of remorse or absence of remorse I would say the following to do all these things in a period almost 10 years during that time no German ever came up to me and said I'm sorry none and as a smaller side when a few months ago I met the ambassador of Rwanda a very nice lady she was a speaker and I was a speaker here too I introduced myself to her and I said I want to apologize for what happened in Rwanda and she was so impressed by that I mean I said it's a shame it's a disgrace to humanity 800,000 people butchered after the Jewish genocide knowing that it might happen and I said it's a disgrace to our community and I want to apologize so she began her remarks she was impressed the first thing he said I want to apologize now the German apology no individual German said sorry it would be asking too much because the people I asked either their father was involved most likely themselves were involved the German government decided they were going to give me their highest civilian award for Dean's Croix Ersterklasse very fancy thing it looked like drama just the way that I said I'll let you know so I met with various groups and I said the German government wants to give me that medal what's your reaction I was not surprised to see that most of the people said are you crazy you're going to sit down it was the same group who wanted to kill us we negotiated you're going to let them hang a ribbon around your neck the same people who murdered my parents this was what year? 1952 and 52 or 53 and maybe 54 by the time of the medal the negotiations began in 52 the treaty began in 50 the West German government only and the West German trials began later in 65 and so forth the treaty on reparation was 1952 1952 it was after that it was fairly recent maybe 10 years ago and I met with the groups and most of them said are you crazy you're not going to let them whitewash themselves at our expense by giving you a medal using you as a patsy and I thought about it and I said I'm going to accept it and I'm going to accept it because this is another generation this is their way of saying I'm sorry and it would be asking too much to ask the individuals who themselves were the murderers to say I'm sorry because they couldn't live with themselves they murdered children by smash their heads against the tree it was common practice and I said this is the new generation saying I'm sorry and I will not spit in their face by saying no and I accepted the prize so a profound and elegant response a profound and elegant response by you okay then I had already met with Oldendorf I never talked to any of my defenders man to man eye to eye I had captured their records I had daily reports from the front top secret how many Jews they killed in which town any other people they killed gypsies as well and other opponents of the Reich presumed opponents and these I had totaled up to over a million people at that point my assignment had been because I had that experience during the war to collect evidence of crimes so General Telford Taylor who was the follow-up on just Jackson the IMT International Military Tribunal trial was already over but he was got 12 additional trials to give a cross-section of German life to see how it was possible for the civilized country like that could commit these terrible crimes so he said Ben look when he hired me he said before you hired me he said I've checked on your record in the military and I see that you are occasionally in subordinate I said that's not correct sir I'm usually in subordinate but I've been checking up on your record too I don't think you're going to give me reason to be in subordinate he said you go with me anyway he said you go collect the evidence and I had the evidence of and he promoted you to an officer you went from being corporal to at that time they wanted to get me they offered you a rank of a full colonel I said in the army I don't go and you didn't have to go to West Point I simulated rank I said what's that I said can I get and tell the lieutenant colonel where to go he said yeah I said okay how long do I have to say you name it I said okay and I called my the lady to whom I've been happily went for the last 73 years without a quarrel I called her up and said I would like to go to Europe for a brief honeymoon she said I'd love it she'd been waiting about 10 years but you did I have to interject here because you did have a quarrel at some stage and you perhaps tell the viewer later in the discussion about your parachuting emergency well that wasn't a quarrel but you jumped ahead of your I was at the door trying to open the door Kelton Taylor was behind me he was pushing the door and the wife was standing next to me the first thing I know the door opens and I fall out but you left your wife behind I felt very guilty about that the door closed behind me oh my god I'm going to survive and they're all going to be killed it was not a quarrel it wasn't a quarrel let me take you back again you asked so many questions you got me there leading you through so you're collecting evidence now now I collected the evidence of the trials and I didn't talk to anybody I didn't want to accept Otto Orlendorf he was the lead defendant he according to his testimony the purport said he had killed 90,000 Jews I asked him who would you say it's correct he said no what do you mean by that well occasionally the men used to brag about the body count they were so proud of having killed more they added more to it which I thought was very revealing as to the argument of superior orders so for them accuracy he felt that these numbers were inaccurate he knew the men had bragged about the body count I said would you say 70,000, 80,000 yeah that could be it so killing of innocent human beings wait a minute he was a very humane man for example he told me his humanity when he said some of the men they would just take an infant and smash his head against the tree he said I never let my men do that I told him when a woman's got an infant and she's crying and the baby's crying you aim at the baby you shoot through the baby and you kill both of them with one shot you save ammunition and solve the problem and he said I told my men smash it against trees you just shoot directly as an indication of humanitarian approach anyway okay so I got this guy he sentenced to death he made a very interesting argument very interesting because it's appropriate today he said look Hitler knew more than I did he had information in which he told us that the Russians planned to attack us therefore it would be necessary for us to preempt that an anticipatory self-defense is legally permissible I have German Gutachten expert opinion saying it's permissible and therefore we acted in self-defense by beating him to the punch and attacking and that's what we were doing and I would do it again under similar circumstances and he answered the judge's question if it was your daughter or your sister you had to send with your killer he would so he was a very patriotic German intelligent well educated I selected the 22 defendants on the basis of their education and their rank I had about 6 or 9 generals and others all had brush had a double doctorate degree Dr. Dr. Rush so I selected them on basis these were top guys I couldn't try 3000 people because maybe he's still sitting in Nuremberg and so Olandorf gave me that argument the next time I heard that argument was when the President of the United States the current President addressed for the first time the United Nations General Assembly since we're sitting here in the United Nations I watched the thing and he explained that North Korea he said if they threaten us or our allies including some little island somewhere I will totally destroy them and somebody had butted up the speech by saying first we're going to ask the United Nations to take it they should be responsible to that really you know so he did put in that sort of talk as well but the threat was I will totally destroy them and I'm watching this and I said Mr. President and they didn't care what is the Republican so I don't care who what are you talking about are you going to go and kill all the people like the Nazis tried to kill they were aiming for killing 12 million Jews how do you destroy a nation you'll pick it up and throw it in the ocean what are you talking about you're supposed to make them they're not afraid of us and not to try to scare the hell out of them my talk like that and I was shocked by the what I thought was the of that kind of a first address by the President of the United States I cannot deny that I know that people are entitled to the difference of a point of view and that they should be respected but to go threaten that you will totally destroy a country are you going to drop another nuclear bomb on them you're going to hit them from the side of the space or wipe them out why do you have in mind why do you threaten such a ridiculous thing such a cruel and inhumane thing my reaction to that I didn't say anything but I wept inside and so now let me come to the end of the story the Germans had given me their highest award that was their expression of regret I took it as that saying I'm sorry because why pick on me I mean you know I stuck the restitution program down their throat and I hanged some of their favorite customers and yet they did that and I accepted it and I don't wear it but I have to draw along with other matters it's a story that I hadn't heard before but you in speaking about the President's address to the General Assembly and in the work that I do with my office when we see the return of the thinking that somehow peoples are more exceptional than others that they are entitled to rights that somehow differ from the rights entitled or should that should be could be claimed by migrants for instance or those who are from ethnic and racial minorities or somehow different and we see throughout Europe again sort of this almost relapse into a way of thinking which is to my mind and I'm sure to yours deeply troubling because in one way it sort of shows the lack or the absence of any deeper thinking about the history of the continent so and I've gone public on this we have the Prime Minister of Hungary saying that he doesn't want his people to be mixing with people of another color when the barely 1,300 Afro-Hungarians in Hungary a country of 10 million people and he's just won his third election we see anti-Semitism rife again throughout Europe we see hostility to of course immigrant communities again emerging from the far right and even in a country like Italy the birthplace of fascism in terms of its philosophies there's this group Casa Pound which is which is openly fascist and they are being interviewed and they go around and harass immigrants so once again the fight is on maybe it never left us maybe this is a continuous struggle for those of us who believe in humanity without distinction without placing labels without differentiating we're all humans entitled to equal rights we deserve to live in dignity without deprivation discrimination or fear and in that as a proud American someone who served this country in war and in peace represented the United States in the most arduous challenges I notice that you put out a statement in the same way that we put out a statement when there was the separation of families taking place in the United States a country that really ever since the end of the second world war has been at the forefront in terms of the advocacy of universal rights and the universal rights agenda it must have been painful for you to have seen this it was very painful for me I knew the Statue of Liberty I came under the Statue of Liberty as an immigrant send me your homelands your tired the wretched refugees of your team he shows send these the distress to me I lift my lamp beside the golden door the lamp went out when he said no immigrants allowed unless they meet the rules that we lay down it was outrageous I was I was furious at anybody would think that it's permissible to take the young children for four or five years of age and take them away from the parents and say the parents go to another country the children go to another country we'll get you together maybe at some later date crime against humanity we list crimes against humanity in the Statue of the International Criminal Court we have other inhumane acts designed to cause suffering what could cause more great suffering than what they did in the name of immigration law it's ridiculous if to change the law that's in the law so I was furious and we should be furious and the students were furious and that gave me a lot of encouragement because frankly I may be sitting here in the United Nations but I don't place my hopes on the diplomats to make change they are dependent upon other countries their alliances their own jobs they don't depend upon the national politicians either because the countries are divided ever since time immemorial some glorify war making that's the only answer it's the one I gave you and I can go to the Peloponnesian Wars it was the same it's existed for centuries this glorification of what I'm now trying to turn around with your help thank you very much but we need more help and the students are with us and I think the future lies with them young people they are very busy now watching competition ball games and jumping and jumping they call it music whatever it is let them enjoy themselves but some of them are thoughtful enough to recognize they're in great danger and I warn them and I talk to young students as much as I can I have a network through the Harvard Divinity School and through the Buddhists and others trying to reach out to the young people telling them we now have the capacity to kill you all and if you don't change the rules and make it clear that the law has to be changed to meet the needs of the society it's supposed to serve that's what law is all about so it's illegal to do what they are doing they are threatening you they are wasting your assets and resources and killing machines when you needed to pay off your school tuition which should have been free for everybody and I think the students would be responsive to that but it requires a mechanism of re-education and this is an example of it your broadcast will be heard by many people I hope and we need you Ben to keep fighting for us as well I never give up I know, I know I wish to recall how when I was chairing those negotiations on the crime of aggression and a few years ago I was in Palo and it was at the end of a very long day the discussion was tortured there was very little agreement between the 193 delegates in the hall and as chair of the working group I was frustrated and I reached 6 p.m. just about to end the discussion and I needed inspiration and I needed a pep talk and I said, call Ben Farage and you walked up to the podium and you gave the delegates an inspired talk but addressing down as well and you reminded us what is at stake that this is not just battle over a few words here on a text but we're talking about the future of humanity, the future of this planet and two or three days after that we reached an agreement that we wanted more and it's your presence that it's a constant reminder to us how we have to achieve and try to strive for something better Ben Farage, thank you so much for this I thank you very much for the compliment and for awareness I don't I'm glad to hear it I don't pause to see if it's having an impact I do the best I can and I never give up and I got a slogan law not war I have that on my license plate Florida and the front and the back of my car and I never give up and that's my advice to the students three pieces of advice, I give them one never give up, two never give up, three never give up Ben, thank you so much it's a true honor my pleasure