End All Wars Today!
Benjamin Ferencz, one of the main prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials, died on April 7, 2023. His death at 103 years old jolted me. I thought of my poet friend ruth weiss’ flight at age ten, a refugee from Nazi Germany during WWII and a fellow Chicagoan.
Portrait of Prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz taken at the Einsatzgruppen Trial in 1947 by US Army Photographer
I watched footage of September 1947 trials, and the reasoned voice of 27-year-old Benjamin Ferencz, boomed loud and clear. The Hungarian-born American served in WWII as Sergeant. A Harvard law school graduate, he was ordered to prosecute the Nazis at the war’s end. He traveled to the war fronts of Germany to investigate, charge, and hold war crimes trials against twenty-four main Nazi officers. Thirteen were executed.
For evidence, Ferencz did not stop at logging the destruction at the scenes of human misery in cities and testimony from those left in the concentration camps. He also gathered Nazi Germany’s efficient Einsatzgruppen reports, documents showing the extent of their human extermination plans for Europeans under orders from “Der Fuhrer” Adolph Hitler.
Ben Ferencz also uncovered details of the Nazi’s “Operation Barbarossa, or Red Beard,” named after a German king from the 12th Century that inspired Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Earlier in the war, Joseph Stalin signed a shocking secret pact with Hitler, who later turned 10 million German combatants against him as they targeted the Soviets for coveted lands.
Ferencz made this poignant observation after decades of seeking German reparations to victims of the Holocaust and, more recently, fighting for the ratification of the 2002 International Criminal Court:
“Frequently, the criminal comes to see himself as a victim.”
We see wars worldwide on many continents, realizing that some current aggressors were once victims of war crimes. We need an urgent appeal for an absolute halt to these destructive wars and a commitment to no longer rely on force. Instead, as Ben Ferencz puts it, we must “use the rule of law evenly to prosecute and hold all those accountable for their actions.” He believed in the pathway set in Germany and stated clearly that ALL instigators of war should be held accountable regardless of position, wealth, and ranking. His legacy lives on.
Beginning in 1957, and for her entire adult life, ruth weiss dyed her hair teal green so she could answer people who asked why she had green hair with the statement, “because war is bad for children.” * The ruth weiss Foundation is bringing up this topic for the annual poetry contest, not to resurrect current and generational pain – not to elicit victimization, although that may happen. The theme is set in the vein of the imperative common goal Ferencz and weiss sought to realize, to find a way to end all wars.
What is good for children? No wars. What can we do collectively and individually to end all wars today?
1. Einsatzgruppen reports
2. Operation Barbarossa (German: Unternehmen Barbarossa; Russian: Операция Барбаросса, romanized: Operatsiya Barbarossa) was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during the Second World War. It was the largest land offensive in human history, with over 10 million combatants taking part.[27] The operation, code-named after Frederick Barbarossa ("red beard"), a 12th-century Holy Roman emperor and German king, put into action Nazi Germany's ideological goal of conquering the western Soviet Union to repopulate it with Germans. The German Generalplan Ost aimed to use some of the conquered people as forced labour for the Axis war effort while acquiring the oil reserves of the Caucasus as well as the agricultural resources of various Soviet territories, including Ukraine and Byelorussia. Their ultimate goal was to create more Lebensraum (living space) for Germany, and the eventual extermination of the Native Slavic peoples by mass deportation to Siberia, Germanisation, enslavement, and genocide.[28][29]
For further information on Benjamin Ferencz, I recommend this CNN story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UBlHLVIgeI&t=23s&ab_channel=CNN