Benjamin B. Ferencz, Romanian born, Jewish American
lawyer. Chief US prosecutor at the
Einsatzgruppen Trial (Sept 1947 - April 1948), 9th of
the 12 subsequent Nuremberg Trials
Ferencz admitted in a 2005 interview with the Washington
Post:
At Auschwitz "they 'processed' 60,000 people a day."
(that's 21,900,000 per year)
He witnessed a SS man, who had not be charged, nor
convicted of anything, handed over to people
in a Displaced Person Camp (which were virtually all
Jews), who tortured him, and burnt him alive.
July 24, 2005
Ferencz, who today is 85 and lives in New York, cautions against making sweeping armchair moral judgments. "Someone who was not there could never really grasp how unreal the situation was," he says. "I once saw DPs beat an SS man and then strap him to the steel gurney of a crematorium. They slid him in the oven, turned on the heat and took him back out. Beat him again, and put him back in until he was burnt alive. I did nothing to stop it. I suppose I could have brandished my weapon or shot in the air, but I was not inclined to do so. Does that make me an accomplice to murder?"
Ferencz also admits threatening to kill civilians who'd
committed no crime, and that statements
taken under duress are invalid. Obviously he wasn't
thinking that most of the statements
taken from the Nazis who admitted to gassing Jews, were
taken under duress ie torture.
Ferencz -- who went on to a distinguished legal career, became a founder of the International Criminal Court and is today probably the leading authority on military jurisprudence of the era -- cannot specifically address Weiss's actions. But he says it's important to recall that military legal norms at the time permitted a host of flexibilities that wouldn't fly today. "You know how I got witness statements?" he says. "I'd go into a village where, say, an American pilot had parachuted and been beaten to death and line everyone one up against the wall. Then I'd say, 'Anyone who lies will be shot on the spot.' It never occurred to me that statements taken under duress would be invalid."
