Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Gregory S. Gordon, author of Nuremberg's Citizen Prosecutor: Benjamin Ferencz and the Birth of International Justice
What inspired you to write this book?
In 2018, at a luncheon in The Hague honoring the last living Nuremberg prosecutor, Benjamin Ferencz, I had a very interesting conversation. Ferencz had recently written the Foreword to my book Atrocity Speech Law, and I was speaking with his son Donald, who had invited me to the event. We were discussing his dad’s historic accomplishments and how terrific it would be if someone were to publish a well-researched, comprehensive account of his life. I remarked that this would be a dream assignment. The following month, Don reached out to me. Apparently there had been some post-Hague discussion about the idea of a Ben Ferencz biography and Don was now encouraging me to take on the project, promising unfettered access. Despite having started another intensive scholarly project, I decided to drop that and pivot to the biography. Ben had been a hero in my formative years, and this was an opportunity to put his life into its full historical context, as well as go beyond his Nuremberg accomplishments and peace advocacy and feature his groundbreaking work on behalf of atrocity victims. I immediately applied for a year of sabbatical leave, got it, and then really plunged into the project.
What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book?
There were two big takeaways for me. First, I have always thought of modern international criminal cases as divisions of labor – investigators investigate, prosecutors prosecute, and victims’ lawyers represent victims. What struck me regarding Ferencz’s work on Nazi crimes was that he was a key player in each phase of the process beginning with his army experience. He was a great Nazi war crimes investigator because, as a buck private fighting Nazis, he understood how military units functioned from the ground up. He was a great prosecutor of Nazi war crimes because he had been a Nazi war crimes investigator. And he was a great lawyer for Nazi war crimes victims because he had prosecuted them. Unlike anyone else in history, he was literally the human connective tissue between Nazi investigations, prosecutions and reparations. He innovated and modeled best practices at each stage and was therefore such an important pioneer. I hope this book will allow him to be seen for his incredible achievements across the Holocaust justice spectrum.
The other thing I learned as the biographer of a subject who was alive for most of the research process is that, while extant biography subjects are invaluable sources of information, it is crucial to conduct research beyond their own accounts of their lives. Potential selective curation and memory lapses may mean that careful and thorough research of the archival record and speaking to all relevant witnesses is essential.
What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book?
As noted, I discovered a great deal beyond Ferencz’s narrative of his own life. Certainly, the many hours I spent in discussion with him were invaluable. But things I learned through independent research that he omitted (or gave short shrift) really blew me away. Some points were more tangential, such as his working relationship with Hannah Arendt (via her service as executive director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction) and his behind-the-scenes discussions that likely influenced prosecutors preparing for the Eichmann trial. Some discoveries were more personal in nature, such as completely unexpected details regarding his family life. But certain revelations were more central to his legal work and legacy. For example, his Nazi art looting investigations yielded important evidence for Herman Göring’s trial. But what really amazed me was discovering his role, early in his Nuremberg experience, as an investigator for the Nazi industrialist cases and, even more incredibly, as a trial attorney for the Krupp proceeding. He would only ever speak about arriving in Nuremberg, soon being sent to Berlin to head the prosecution’s chief investigative office, followed by his courtroom work for the Einsatzgruppen trial, and then service as Executive Counsel – he would never speak about his Nuremberg work on the industrialist cases, which turned out to be quite significant in his life story.
What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?
It relates to my initial industrialist work discovery. I was at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, carefully reading through the Telford Taylor Papers (Taylor succeeded Robert Jackson as US Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg). I remember thinking: “Why am I doing this? I have spent three days with Ben Ferencz going over every minute detail of his life story. What can I possibly find here?” I was about to give up but kept looking. And then I was floored by a document I saw. It was an account of Ben Ferencz cross-examining a witness in the Krupp trial (whose armaments manufacturer defendants helped Hitler’s aggressive war preparations and used slave labor). Excited, I ran out of the library without my coat, pulled out my cell phone and, shivering in the cold winter air, started calling Nuremberg experts, including Ben’s son Don. None of them had been aware of Ferencz as a Krupp podium prosecutor. I later gained access to letters, previously unseen by other scholars, revealing Ferencz’s early Nuremberg work on the industrialist cases, with one explaining his perception that successful industrialist prosecutions could help end the scourge of aggressive war. This helped contextualize his later slave labor civil litigation cases against Nazi industrialists and his even later peace advocacy. With respect to the latter, I had never really seen a clear linear connection between his Einsatzgruppen crimes against humanity work and his end-phase aggression-focused work. I began to look at these “industrialist” discoveries as the “missing link” helping explain Ferencz’s career arc.
What’s next?
My research for Nuremberg’s Citizen Prosecutor, left me wondering why Ferencz never spoke about his Nuremberg industrialist case work. Part of the explanation, I think, is that Einsatzgruppen was such a smashing success compared to Krupp, where the prosecution failed to secure convictions on the aggressive war-related charges (and Ferencz joined the trial team mid-proceeding, after finishing Einsatzgruppen). Excluding his months investigating the industrialists, Ferencz’s standard account chose to focus on his transfer to Berlin after arriving in Nuremberg and then his work as Einsatzgruppen chief prosecutor, for what the AP described as “the biggest murder trial in history.” In his mind, I believe, that was a cleaner, more impressive narrative. But it made me wonder about details often overlooked in better known biographical accounts. I spent my sabbatical year in Italy and learned to speak Italian. Being there, and with my newly acquired language skills, I started thinking about someone on the opposite end of the justice spectrum – Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. We often associate him with Hitler, but Mussolini’s country was not simply an Italian version of Nazi Germany. And its crimes, while heinous, were not the focus of Allied international prosecutions at Nuremberg. It has been an easier, cleaner narrative to speak of prosecuting Nazis after the war and exclude Italians. I want to better understand, in detail, exactly what the Italian crimes were. So the working title for my next biography is The Prosecutor v. Benito Mussolini: The Life and Crimes of History’s First Fascist.
