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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-08-28
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwa4zRWDsvI
let me begin without further ado by explaining and that job I was born in a little village and Vania nobody knows about data close they've heard of Dracula but it was a little village the house had a no water no light shouldn't even have television and of the family consisting all my mother father and a sister and myself our admin subjected to persecution and poverty and
the only thing we could do would be to get out of there as soon as possible the nations were changing nationalities my sister was born in Hungary always born in the same bed they called it Romania Bolivia's charm while following the first World War we landed by taking a small ship across the Atlantic Ocean and this summer arm we traveled third class because there was no
fourth class the mortgage itself was very perilous my grandmother who followed shortly after us died of pneumonia on the ship when we landed in New York we were lucky to find someone who offered a shelter my father would become a janitor or an apartment house a tenement house we would be allowed to don't even live in the cellar and that's where my life in America began
my memory begins are in a guides seller in a place called hell's kitchen in New York which was the high density crime area I won't go bore you with the details we lived in poverty I'd lived in poverty most of my life but yeah I had the courage to go to a good school arm I applied for admission to the Harvard Law School was accepted me
given a scholarship my exam on criminal law our I was still in law school when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor occurred everybody I know went down when list our it took me awhile because I was very short plus about five feet tall and dom eventually I did analyst in the army as a private in the artillery our I was sent who were your pin that
passivity join in the landing at Normandy well the invasion of France I remember very well since is a British bought cast the British sailors were the charge of the landing craft and the as I jumped out into the water well most of the so it is the one to one of their ankles for me went up to my knee and the British sailor slapped me on
the back and he said la that's the way to Berlin Jahnke good luck and that was my return to your I won't go into the details of war itself hello that's been adequately described elsewhere I can only tell you the conclusion war is hell ha ha and I went through it not merely landing on Normandy beach where my that time they were dead soldiers American soldiers
in uniform floating face down in the water tanks mired in the sand of the Germans waiting of a short distance away counter attack aren't I crossed the Rhine on the pan pontoon bridge in the jeep I am participated in every major battle till the final battle of the bulge and on the most interesting thing are well my antiwar experience was the horrors that I personally witnessed
are on assignment Bob general Patton's headquarters going to the concentration camps has that will being liberated I collect evidence of the crimes so that the offender the perpetrators could be held to account in a court of law which was intended at that time and I need not describe in detail the concentration camp five difficulty in going self our bodies lying on the ground you couldn't tell
if they were dead or alive eyes pleading for help stacks of what had been Hillman's piled up looking like back some bones before the crematoria waiting can be blind yeah every possible disease typhus rats lies isn't Terry the idea was to get in and get the evidence and get out as fast as your cat and I move on to the next camp and that's what I
did more from camp to camp Pembleton wild which was the first camp demont house into flotsam Bernthal host of camps with the circumstances all around the same Tara is the only way to describe it Newman being is what band into animals Lynn behaving like rats climbing into a pile of rubble and garbage trying to find some morsel of bread of food that would helps diminish some
of the F. starvation know that they are all of this I saw a very close hand and of course it had an Indo made indelible impression on me when the war was over all I wanted was to go home and resume a normal life I'd and a lot of people back in Germany I came back to the states about ten million soldiers looking for a job
I had been admitted to the bar before I entered the army arm one day I got a telegram from the Pentagon dusa they had never called me Sir before %HESITATION I went they wanted to talk to me about a job alone they wanted to send me back to Germany I help with the military commissions which I had worked on in my days as a soldier as
at that time a corporal or sergeant of infantry all they wanted me to go back I helped them set up these military commission trials which would it take place in Munich and these have been all but forgotten %HESITATION why we were discussing that possibility and I was refusing to go back into military service unless we declared war on Germany again a long losing as the military
and I didn't quite see eye to eye I made it a point not to obey any order that I know was a legal issue but anda Bill Murray often I was in hot water with the %HESITATION when they army bureaucracy in any case I was hired then my a man who was then general Telford Taylor later we became law partners in New York he was in
charge boy did by president Truman if in doubt twelve additional trials in Nuremberg and the purpose of those trials wish to parent a broader picture a German alive and it was not just the snapshot of Harmon during a new Goebbels and all the people and the first international military tribunal trial at Nuremberg but you see how it was possible for a country like Germany of civilized
country not only engage in these atrocities what do three other men encourage them our hallways if possible so we wanted to have the trial of the doctors who perform medical experiments the lawyers and judges who perverted the law that was a sub recall film judgment at Nuremberg the generals the members of the SS the storm troopers who were doing the actual murdering the army themselves the
diplomats themselves into and the industrialists who built the concentration camps they provided the funds for them in order to have free labor and the people working there will be literally walk to death and yeah so I went back to Germany and the general Taylor who was in charge of the twelve trials said look bad you know all about Germany about concentration camps you are collecting evidence
of that we have suspects but we need the evidence to convict him if we have only a suspect and no evidence you have no case if you have the evidence but no suspect in custody we have no case so my job was to fire enough convicting evidence who hold the people we've had such as suspects in Nuremberg I went to Berlin set up a staff of
about fifty people and they are there we calm through the ruins of the various Drummond offices the SS the foreign ministry's at Shatra and we've found a batch of reports from the Eastern Front a top secret of Boston all in German arm tend to Berlin whenever consolidated unusual reports however a nondescript or outfit called Einsatzgruppen I'm such in Germany mange action ruefully means groups and it
was deliberately nondescript because they didn't want and you want to know what their assignment was their assignment very simple watched them go and behind the German lines and killed I never used the word kill they said eliminate or something like that every single Jewish man woman and child a good lay their hands on do the same thing for the gypsies do the same thing or anybody
else who might be perceived as a threat or future chat threat to Germany I went to Berlin I had these documents I flew with him but the sampling down to Nuremberg a and I should do general Taylor we have to put on a new trial you said we can't %HESITATION was shot cases all been assigned all the lawyers have been inside the Pentagon is not keen
on these trials to begin with I'll never get approval for an eye boys operations said we cannot let these mass murderers go free I have in my hand mass murder on a scale never before seen in human history and we can't just walk away from it he said can you do this in addition to your other work and I said sure okay said then you do
it and so I was appointed to became the chief prosecutor of what was known as the Einsatzgruppen case I accused the twenty two defendants all of murdering in cold blood over million people including thousands of children shot one shot at a time I was then twenty seven years old it was my first case the difficult thing for me was to decide what penalty go why I
ask all how do you balance in the scale of justice calculated murder of a million people innocent people with the lives of twenty two selected defendants out of three thousand %HESITATION everyday did these killings for about a two year period and I concluded that do just ask for the death penalty would be totally inadequate to match wish severity of the crime and instead of that I
ask the court to affirm my international criminal the ride along human beings live in peace and dignity regardless of their race or creed because the evil Lamar did simply because they didn't share the race Brito ideology of the executioners and I thought that was quite horrible and if we could get a rule of law I was already a lawyer and I was always it listed in
law if we could get a rule of law which would act humankind against such future atrocities that would be more significant than anything we did with the you selected handful of murderers are the judgment of the court found all of the defendant's guilt be thirteen number sentence to death and of course reaffirmed Meyer of plea or the entitlement of all human beings live in peace and
dignity regardless of their race or creed it was my plea all humanity of play of humanity to law and that has never left me I am I when the trials were all well I I recognize there was more to list punishing a handful of defendants are we have to do something for the victims as well and I worked on creating I know precedents in the law
it took a lot of bold action and bold thinking to say if I could never existed before is irrelevant if you will do harm to a partition illegally you have a duty Marley as well as legally tried to compensate it on to the home and I set up all the rest Hoosier program folder layouts you victims regardless of race or creed you get compensation from Germany
West Germany that program is continuing to this day that was another thing but the most important thing the most important by far is to prevent it from happening again and everybody said van what you're trying to do is you're trying to stop war making and the answer is yes I am trying to stop war making because the current system whereby if two heads of state are
unable to agree may take young people like all of you and send them out to kill all the young people they don't even know you may have done them no harm when they get tired of killing each other they rest for awhile declare victory then they start again killing each other that's the current system it's playing crazy and the money if they need to take care
of the students who pay their obligations to take care of the rest refugees to take care of the poor and the medical requirements of the aged it's wasted on armaments today we can kill everybody from cyberspace nuclear weapons are already obsolete from cyberspace big cut off the electrical grid on planet earth which means if they want to cut off the electrical grid our for London is
you just shut off what happened to the people in London or any other state or country where they'll be dead in a week or two is used is the issue so that's a world in which we live you are now very dangerous condition today much more so than ever before I'm not concerned with my welfare I am concerned with yours so I want to say since
my time here is limited our home soon this torch will drop from my hands I know that someone else will pick it up our whoever of people that may be and they will be more than one I hope I know will be arm run with it as far as you can possible to do the impossible we see it from cyberspace today we see it when the
emancipation of women we share from same sex marriages this just impossible a few years ago today it's a reality all weekend doing the impossible what's so impossible all choppy war make you when you're spending all your money on trying to kill more people instead of trying to help them so I think that dove when this toy shops from my hand someone will pick it up and
run with it if they can't round they'll walk with it'll take awhile if they can't walk don't well with it but we are male not moving forward we have an international criminal court will bending beginning to create effective laws we have not yet come to the enforcement problem which is vital but we are working on it and there has been an awakening of the human conscience
as a result largely of the Nuremberg trials and it's sad but you have to build upon no I say to all of you do not despair be bold in your thinking and your act don't assume that anything is impossible do what you're always right and if you do I know you'll have a happier life than I have had thank you very much
