The Importance of War Crimes

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A war crime, technically, is simply a violation of the rules of warfare. Most of the cases he investigated involved German soldiers killing American prisoners. When a war is on, the war crimes rules as laid down in the war are forgotten. Your problem is you kill the other guy before he kills you. Trying to make war more humane is absurd.

When Benjamin Ferencz was 27 years old, he prosecuted his very first trial. It's been called the largest murder trial in history, with more than one million victims. There were 22 defendants, each of them high-ranking members of Nazi Germany’s death squad.

Benjamin Ferencz died last Friday, April 7, at the age of 103. He was the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials. Today, we're sharing our conversation from 2018.

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