Gratitude Monday: The rule of law

We’re 15 years on from the September 11 attacks, and it’s Gratitude Monday. It’s also the last two months of the most vicious and divisive presidential election I’ve ever experienced, so my prevailing emotions are disgust and anger.

So today I’m grateful that I recently came across this story in the Washington Post about a man the reporter calls a legal giant, Benjamin Ferencz.

Ferencz, who emigrated with his family to the United States from what’s now Hungary to escape anti-Semitic persecution, grew up in New York City and went to college at CCNY. He graduated from Harvard Law School and served the 3^rd Army from 1943, seeing action in Normandy and Bastogne, and present at the liberation of several concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Flossenburg and Mauthausen. He wanted to be a pilot, but at 5’2”, his feet wouldn’t reach the pedals.

After the end of the war he joined the legal team that was trailblazing international law with the concept of prosecuting war crimes. Telford Taylor was his boss. At age 27, he drove the investigation and prosecuted 22 Einsatzgruppen commanders. Einsatzgruppen were the units that followed in the wake of the Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe; their job was to eradicate Jews—and commissars, and gypsies, and some others; but primarily Jews—from the conquered territories.

In what the Associated Press called the “biggest murder trial in history”, and Ferencz’s first prosecution, he called a single witness, who certified the sheaves of ledgers that documented the murdered. All 22 were convicted. Ferencz told the judge, “If these men be immune, then law has lost its meaning, and man must live in fear.”

Take a few minutes to watch this video; Ferencz describes his work at Nuremberg.

From that very first case, Ferencz has worked for the rule of law; his achievements include the establishment of the International Criminal Court at The Hague. He’s 96 years old, now, living in retirement in Florida, and he’s given more than a million dollars (renewable annually up to ten million) to the Holocaust Memorial Museum for an international justice initiative.

This year we’re bombarded by politicians and their supporters strutting across the media stage proclaiming how the time has come to pursue our enemies with all our military might without regard to that pesky law. Carpet bomb! Take the oil! Lock them in camps! Anything is legal in war! And I am reminded of two things:

In A Man for All Seasons, playwright Robert Bolt gives Thomas More and his son-in-law Will Roper this exchange:

Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

Roper: “Yes. I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

And in 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower (who had been Ferencz’s ultimate ETO commander) warned, “In a very real sense, the world no longer has a choice between force and law. If civilization is to survive, it must choose the rule of law.”

As a civilized society, you don’t bomb them into the Stone Age, you hold them accountable according to the rule of law.

The day after our annual remembrance of 9/11 and in the fetid pool of the presidential race, it brings me to tears to know that there are some men and women like Benjamin Ferencz, who understand that if we do not live by the rule of law, we are not alive at all.