Crime and punishment | 25 May 2017

‘Hell is better than what I personally witnessed,’ says Ben Ferencz, who was one of the American troops sent in to the Nazi death camps to collect vital evidence. ‘Dead bodies mingled with those alive. Piles of bones waiting to be buried. The smell of burning flesh. Those who were still alive pleading with their eyes.’ All of which we have heard many times before, perhaps too many times. But then Ferencz added, ‘SS men trying to flee, running away, and the inmates, those who could still walk, trying to chase them, grabbing at them.’ It was an unusual, vivid detail that captured the attention.

Ferencz was talking to Emma Barnett in her slot Eye of the Storm on Radio Five Live last week. Not that Barnett had much chance to say anything. Ferencz is extraordinary, at 97 talking as fast and as articulately as someone at least 30 years younger. He is the last surviving Nazi war-crimes prosecutor and has spent the whole of his life ensuring that what happened in Germany will never be forgotten. But again if you thought you knew everything there is to know about Nuremberg Ferencz’s conversation with Barnett might well surprise you because his job was to put on trial not the camp commandants but those senior officers who had conducted what he defined at the time as ‘genocide’. They rounded up Jews, gypsies and other ‘aliens’ who were behind the frontline in Germany and killed them on the spot, women and children mostly. Up to a million are thought to have been murdered in this way.

Top-secret reports of these killings were discovered by the Americans when they entered the city in 1945. Ferencz, aged just 27, was put in charge of the prosecution. How did he decide who to prosecute? asked Barnett (because there was only room in the courtroom at Nuremberg for 22 defendants).