- Person
- Fritz Bauer
- Lived
- 1903–1968
- Field
- Prosecutor & Jurist
- From
- German
The story
Fritz Bauer, born in Stuttgart in 1903 to a Jewish family, was a judge who had been imprisoned by the Nazis in 1933 and survived the war in Danish and Swedish exile. He returned to Germany in 1949 and in 1956 became attorney general of Hesse, based in Frankfurt. Most of his colleagues in the postwar justice system had served the Nazi dictatorship, and he once said that in the judiciary he lived as if in exile.
Information about many former Auschwitz staff and their whereabouts had been in West German hands since 1958, but cases were delayed by disputes over which court was responsible. Bauer cut through this. In 1959 he persuaded the Federal Court of Justice to hand the investigation of Auschwitz crimes to the regional court in Frankfurt, and on his instructions prosecutors there opened proceedings against former members and leaders of the camp's SS. As historian Gary J. Bass notes, he made a point of prosecuting not only senior leaders but lower-ranked staff, since everyone who operated the death camp contributed to mass murder.
The trial, formally the criminal case against Mulka and others, opened in December 1963 against 22 defendants in a civic hall in Frankfurt's Gallus district, converted into a courtroom. It ran until August 1965, with 183 days of hearings. The court heard 319 witnesses, including 181 survivors of Auschwitz, in 430 hours of recorded testimony. Six defendants received life sentences. Bauer was frustrated that German law treated most killers who followed orders only as accomplices to murder, so many received short terms.
Still, the proceedings were largely public and brought many details of the Holocaust to the attention of Germans and the wider world. The playwright Peter Weiss turned the testimony into his 1965 play The Investigation, and further Frankfurt trials of Auschwitz personnel followed into the late 1960s.
The trials would probably not have taken place without Bauer's persistence, and they opened a public reckoning with the Holocaust in Germany from the mid-1960s. In 2017 UNESCO added the trial's original tape recordings to its Memory of the World International Register, and in 2019 the hall where the trial was held was renamed the Fritz Bauer Hall.
Why it matters
The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial put survivors' testimony on the public record and began Germany's open reckoning with the Holocaust, a record UNESCO now preserves for the world.
About Fritz Bauer
Jewish judge, exile and Hesse attorney general who secretly tipped off Israel to Eichmann’s hiding place and forced West Germany to face Auschwitz in the Frankfurt trials of 1963–65.
More about Fritz Bauer
- Fritz Bauer enlisted historians to document the SSFor the Auschwitz trial Fritz Bauer recruited expert historians whose research became Anatomy of the SS State, the first thorough survey of the SS based on its own records.
- Fritz Bauer called for war crimes trials from exileIn Swedish exile Fritz Bauer co-founded a periodical with Willy Brandt and in 1945 published Die Kriegsverbrecher vor Gericht, War Criminals in Court.
- Fritz Bauer worked for a more humane justice systemFritz Bauer co-founded the Humanist Union, a civil rights group, and argued for a criminal law focused on rehabilitation; a prize in his name honors legal reformers.
- Fritz Bauer won justice for the plotters against HitlerIn the 1952 Remer trial, prosecutor Fritz Bauer argued that the Nazi state was not a state under the rule of law, and the July 1944 resisters were legally and morally rehabilitated.
- Fritz Bauer taught young Germans about the roots of NazismFritz Bauer lectured youth groups on the roots of fascism and backed a Frankfurt student group working against antisemitism and for ties with Israel.
- Fritz Bauer's tip led Israel to Adolf EichmannIn 1957 German prosecutor Fritz Bauer secretly told Israel where Adolf Eichmann was hiding in Argentina, a crucial lead that resulted in his capture in 1960.
- Fritz Bauer defended German democracy before 1933Appointed in 1930, Fritz Bauer was the youngest local judge in the Weimar Republic, and he campaigned publicly to defend the democratic constitution against the Nazis.
Sources
- Frankfurt Auschwitz trials Wikipedia
- Fritz Bauer Wikipedia
- Fritz Bauer Fritz Bauer Institut
- Fritz Bauer Wikipedia (German)
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.