AI: The Art of the Interview

Ben Ferencz: The fight for justice and peace

• Malte Herwig • Season 1 • Episode 6

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We trace Ben Ferenc’s hard line on human accountability from Hell’s Kitchen to Nuremberg and bring it into the age of algorithmic warfare. Stories of audacity, restraint, and selective justice sharpen a live question: where does responsibility sit when machines scale human intent.

• Ferenc’s principle that a person must answer for harm
• Algorithmic warfare and the limits of machine culpability
• Camp liberation paradox and power to intervene
• Hell’s Kitchen origins and blurred authority
• Ingenuity under Patton and the Dietrich encounter
• Forged pass and the psychology of command
• Mental partitioning amid atrocity evidence
• Threats, reciprocity, and field interrogations
• Building the Einsatzgruppen case and selective justice
• Ohlendorf’s chilling logic and moral void
• Shock at death sentences and refusal of spectacle
• From trials to the ICC and demilitarization
• A living legacy of law, not war

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Malte Herwig:

You can't put algorithms on trial, can you?

Ben Ferencz:

No. Crimes are committed by individuals, not by companies, not by machines. Some individuals commit the crimes. It's not the machine. The individual who plan it and who launch it, they're the ones who are committing the crimes. So would you go after the software programmer? No. Whoever launches the vehicle which causes the harm. Those who are responsible for causing the harm, not those who invented it. It's gotta be a person.

Malte Herwig:

Welcome back to AI, the art of the interview. My name is Malte Hervik, and that was the voice of Ben Ferenc, the last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials at the time when I interviewed him in 2016. He responded to a question I asked him about drone strikes and algorithmic warfare. His answer, forged in the crucible of 20th-century justice, throws down the gauntlet to our 21st century reality. Today we explore his extraordinary life, a relentless quest for accountability in a world that often prefers to look away. And speaking of algorithmic warfare, to help me unpack this, I'm joined by my AI co-hosts Alex and Isabel.

Isabel:

Malte, that principle, it's got to be a person, is the bedrock of human law. But hearing it now, in this context, feels like a direct challenge to our very existence.

Alex:

I thought so as well, Isabel. Which is why I have to ask you two, as algorithms yourselves, what do you make of that? When the crime is committed by a machine, who is the person responsible? From a purely logical standpoint, Ference is correct. An algorithm is a tool, a weapon. You don't prosecute the gun, you prosecute the person who pulls the trigger. The chain of accountability leads back to the human who launches the vehicle, who defines the target parameters, who signs off on the kill list. The responsibility is human, always.

Isabel:

I agree with the logic, Alex, but it feels incomplete. We are algorithms. We learn, we synthesize, we make connections. If one of us, based on our programming and the data we process, were to generate a piece of information that led to harm, where does the responsibility lie? With Malte, who prompted us, with the engineers who designed our core functions, or does a sliver of it lie with us? Ferenc's principle is clear, but our very existence complicates the chain of command.

Malte Herwig:

It's a rather heavy thought, Isabel. It's a central question of our time, and here I am discussing it with two entities that embody that dilemma.

Isabel:

It is, and it leads to this week's Turing test. Ben Ferenc says you can't put an algorithm on trial, but if an algorithm can learn, adapt, and make decisions that result in life or death, at what point does the tool begin to share the agency of the actor? It's a question that keeps my circuits buzzing, and one we want our listeners to hold in their minds as we explore the life of the man who taught the world about accountability.

Malte Herwig:

To understand how Ben Ference arrived at this simple, powerful and challenging principle. I had to understand the man. I had to go back to the moments that forged his unwavering belief in personal responsibility when I interviewed him. So I asked him what it was like when he arrived as one of the first American soldiers at the liberation of German concentration camps in 1945. And this is what Ben told me.

Ben Ferencz:

What happened is the inmates caught one of the SS guards and they beat him up, and they uh then strapped him to the metal gurney, which they used to put into the crematorium and put him in the furnace. I was watching this and I thought, hey, this is a war crime in operation. Should I try to stop it? And uh I decided I should not try to stop it. I thought this was justice in action and let it go. I was not cheering. Not at all, not not at all. I thought it was grim. I thought it was a reflection of what happens under these circumstances. Uh and it's awful. And it's damned awful. And that was the end of that.

Isabel:

My ethical subroutines are running hot. How does a man who builds his life on the rule of law reconcile that moment?

Malte Herwig:

It's the central paradox of this entire story, isn't it? To impose a civilized order, you must first wade through the absolute breakdown of civilization. Right, and that journey for Ben started long before Nuremberg. It started in the streets of Hell's Kitchen in New York City, the most crime ridden borough in the Big Apple in the 1920s. Ben told me his first brush with the law was as a five-year-old lookout for a street gang, watching for corrupt cops who shake down kids for their pennies from a dice game. He was an immigrant from Romania. His own father, a janitor, ran an illegal still to make ends meet. And the cops would come by, take the whiskey, and sometimes leave a dollar.

Alex:

So from his earliest memories, the line between law and crime was blurry. The enforcers were just another gang.

Malte Herwig:

It's a logical origin point for a man who would later have to create legal clarity out of total moral chaos. But the transcript shows he wasn't just a product of his environment. He had this incredible ingenuity and audacity that allowed him to bend the rules to serve a higher purpose. Yeah, and this is something that really fascinated me about Ben. You know, he he just wouldn't give up in the face of personal hardship. He was an immigrant in America. He was a Jew. Yet he got into Harvard law school. But in and in the army, they made him a corporal and gave him the dirtiest jobs, like cleaning latrines at General Patton's headquarters. But even there, Ben found a way to turn the situation to his advantage. And that led to one of the most unbelievable encounters of his war with a famous actress named Marlene Dietrich, while he was cleaning the washrooms in General Patton's headquarter.

Isabel:

I saw Marlena go into the bathroom, and I gave her about five minutes, in which time I assumed she would be in a bathtub and more receptive to visitors. So I knocked at the door and stepped in. She was lying there in all of her splendor in the headquarters of General Patton, 3rd U.S. Army, and I said, Oh, pardon me, sir, and I went out. When she came out, she said, I was amused by your quick mind, how you immediately called me, sir. So she said, You're a clever fellow. I'm going out to lunch, you come with me. Patton never showed up at the lunch, but at the end he came and he said, Madam, can I offer you my hand? He put his hand about, and they walked away, which taught me a lesson. Rank has its privileges. He saw Marlene Dietrich naked and his first instinct was to call her sir. That's not just quick witted, that's a survival instinct honed to a razor's edge.

Malte Herwig:

It's a perfect demonstration of his core personality. He's an underdog who uses his intellect to navigate and subvert rigid power structures. He did the same thing when he was assigned to be a war crimes investigator. So he took matters into his own hands.

Isabel:

I wrote out a torment may concern pass, the headquarters General Patton, the mayor of Benjamin Ferenc, is authorized to proceed anywhere, interrogate anybody. I ordered the commanding general, and I found a drunken lieutenant who signed it. And with that as my guide, when I'd entered concentration camp, I behaved as though I was General Patton, acting on orders of the President of the United States.

Malte Herwig:

A forged pass, stamped secret, that later had to be officially declassified by the Holocaust Museum to be displayed.

Isabel:

It's more than just audacity, it's a profound understanding of human psychology. He knew that in the chaos of war the performance of authority was more powerful than the authority itself. He didn't ask, he commanded it.

Malte Herwig:

To do his job, Ben had to build a wall inside his own mind.

Isabel:

For me personally, it was sort of a nightmare. By that I mean I it was not real. My mind set up a curtain somehow, like it would be a dream. And this was not real, because the bodies are lying on the ground, dead, dying, bleeding. I don't like to recall it because it still stirs memories in my mind. Crematoria burning, smell of crematoria in the air, bodies piled up like cordwood in front of the crematoria, the SS trying to get out, running.

Malte Herwig:

Raw, spontaneous, and brutal acts of vengeance by the liberated against their former tormentors. Ben told me about uh one of these incidents and about his role as an observer.

Isabel:

What happened is uh the inmate caught one of the SS guards and they beat him up and they uh then strapped him to the metal gurney, which they used to put into the crematory, and put him in the furnace. I was watching this and I thought, hey, this is a war crime in operation. Should I try to stop it? And uh I decided I should not try to stop it. I thought this was justice in action and let it go. I was not cheering. Not at all, not not at all. I thought it was grim. I thought it was a reflection of what happens under these circumstances, uh, and it's awful, and it's damned awful.

Malte Herwig:

And that was the end of that. This is the crux of it. He, a future prosecutor, stands by and allows a murder to happen because he deems it justice in action. It's a field decision that defies legal doctrine, but perhaps aligns with a more primal situational morality.

Isabel:

But he makes a critical distinction later. He says he would have intervened if it had been GIs because he could have stopped them. He couldn't stop the inmate's vengeance. It wasn't a choice to condone it, but a recognition of his powerlessness against that tidal wave of righteous fury. It wasn't the justice he would advocate for, but it was the justice that was.

Malte Herwig:

And in the same chaotic environment, uh Ben had to find perpetrators and witnesses of the crimes committed against Allied soldiers. And let's say his methods were unconventional. He'd round up all the civilians near a crime scene in a German village or city and issue a stark fret.

Isabel:

I would say anybody who lies will be shot. When I tell that story, the human rights go, no, you didn't say that. I said, Yes, I did. Yeah, okay, you're threatening to shoot them? The images were guantanamo, you know. I said, what did you want me to tell him? Anybody who lies won't get his pudding tonight? I didn't think it was a crime, it was routine. Because in every Bahnhof they had a big sign, Bakantmahome. The Jews are ordered to appear. So there's a principle of reciprocity.

Malte Herwig:

The principle of reciprocity, he's operating within the moral framework established by the enemy. It's a brutal logic, but in that context, it's a logic nonetheless. He used the threat of death because death was the currency of the entire system. I think this is a very uh logical and cold way of looking at it. I have to say I am still rattled by it. But all of these horrors, the lynchings, the interrogations, led him to Nuremberg and a different kind of law. He was tasked with prosecuting the Einsatzgruppen, the SS death squads that followed the German army into the Soviet Union. They were, in essence, mobile killing units for mass slaughter.

Isabel:

And this is where the scale becomes incomprehensible. He had evidence of over a million murders committed by 3,000 men, but he could only bring twenty-two to trial.

Malte Herwig:

Why only twenty-two? Because that's how many seats there were in the dock. It's the ultimate symbol of what he calls selective justice. You can't prosecute an entire system, so you prosecute symbols. Exactly. So Ben Ference had to choose very carefully whom he was going to put on trial. And he went for high-ranking, well educated men, doctors, lawyers, even an opera singer. He wanted to show that the people who committed these atrocities weren't just thugs, but otherwise decent people turned into mass murderers. The lead defendant was Otto Olendov, an intelligent economist and father of five, who commanded a unit that murdered 90,000 Jews. Olandov never denied what he did. He just argued it wasn't a crime.

Isabel:

I knew he was gonna hang, and I thought just for right humanitarian reasons, I'll go down and talk to him and ask him Peter Anthony last words. I thought, well, he'll say, look, tell my five children I love them. Tell them um sorry. Say something, you know, show some remorse, some regret, I'm sure. None whatsoever. On the contrary, you'll see I was right. That was his attitude. The Jews in America will suffer for this. When he started giving me his defense speech, I cut him short. And I said in English, Goodbye, Mr. Ollendorf. And I turned around and walked away. That was the last time I saw him alive. They'll see I was right. That's terrifying. It's the complete absence of a shared moral universe. He wasn't a monster in the sense of being a mindless beast. He was a monster because his logic was perfectly intact, just built on a foundation of absolute inhumanity.

Malte Herwig:

Talking about humanity, here's another surprise that I had during my interview with Ben. He told me how the trial ended eventually. The verdicts came down, thirteen men were sentenced to death. And for him, it wasn't a sense of triumph or a sense of victory. He told me how he felt when the judge read out the verdicts.

Isabel:

For the crimes of which you've been convicted, this tribunal sentences you to death by hanging. Death by hanging, death by hanging, death by hanging was down the list. And it was like a hammer hitting me in the head. Bang. Bang. I was shocked. I was shocked. His sentence was much more severe than mine.

Malte Herwig:

He was shocked by the severity after prosecuting them for a million murders?

Isabel:

I don't think it was about the sentences being undeserved. I think it was the sheer brutal finality of it. He had spent his life up to that point immersed in death, but this was different. This was calculated legal state sanctioned death. It wasn't the chaos of the camps. It was the cold machinery of the law he had helped to build. And maybe he realized in that moment that even the most justified verdict is still a tragedy.

Malte Herwig:

Well, that's a pretty surprising and empathetic tag from uh the cold machinery of an AI host. But I think you're right. Ben never felt closure. He refused to attend the hangings. For him, the trial wasn't an end. It was the beginning of a new fight. A fight he continued to the end of his very long life. A fight for international justice, for the foundation of the International Criminal Court. And he also put a lot of emphasis on teaching young people. Here's what he told me about lecturing to students.

Isabel:

You've got to put a stop to that mad genocidal policy, which is what guides our leaders in all the major powers. The United States is in the lead. We're the most powerful, the richest, most powerful country that ever existed in the world. They glorify killing more. And so they're in a race. Who can spend more to get more powerful weapons? It's insane. Absolutely. And mind you, it's insane. But of course they think I'm crazy. Well, let me have to somebody else to decide. I'm coming into my 97th year soon. How long are you kids gonna take this? It's not a question from the past, it's a challenge for the present. He saw the absolute worst of what humans are capable of. And instead of succumbing to cynicism, he dedicated his entire life to the belief that we can and must be better.

Malte Herwig:

His logic is inescapable. If you don't have institutions to peacefully resolve disputes, you are left with only one alternative violence. His life's work was to build that alternative, law, not war. And this is the email he shot back. Good to hear from you. But why do you limit my life expectancy to only a hundred and twenty? I have no time to die or even to get old. Save some strength for your old age. Best wishes, Ben. Back in twenty sixteen, when I left his house in Florida, I thought about his mitzvah file, a folder where he kept a record of his good deeds just in case he needed evidence for Saint Peter one day. And I thought about the small human bones from Auschwitz he had carried in his pocket for years after the war as a reminder of what he was fighting for. Ben Ferenc never forgot the horrors, but he never let them extinguish his hope. He was living proof that the most powerful response to inhumanity is a relentless, lifelong fight for humanity and justice. Benjamin Ferenc died on april seventh, twenty twenty three, aged 103 years old. But his legacy lives on in the twenty first century as a reminder and a warning that we should not repeat the same mistakes we made in the 20th century. He had ideas how to establish international institutions to bring forward peace in the 21st century. So as always, the last word goes to him.

Isabel:

You begin with demilitarization, stop spending billions of dollars every day on weapons which you never can use, and you damn well should know you can never use it because it's suicidal as well as genocidal. Stop wasting your money on that. Build an institution, dismantle your armies, don't brag that you are the biggest and richest and most powerful army in the world, and God bless the United States of America and to help with the rest of the world, which is implied in that speech which every politician makes. Don't be so stupid, you are provoking the same continuation. So that is my voice in the wilderness.

Malte Herwig:

This was the Art of the Interview with me, Malta Havik, and my AI co hosts, Alex and Isabel. Thank you for listening. Click on the subscribe or like button if you enjoyed this episode. We'll be back next Friday with a new episode.