- Person
- Fritz Bauer
- Lived
- 1903–1968
- Field
- Prosecutor & Jurist
- From
- German
The story
Fritz Bauer was a young Social Democratic judge in Stuttgart when the Nazis came to power. Arrested in March 1933, he spent eight months in the Heuberg and Oberer Kuhberg concentration camps and was then dismissed from the judiciary. In 1936 he emigrated to Denmark, and when the deportation of Danish Jews began in October 1943 he went into hiding and escaped by fishing boat to Sweden with his parents and his sister's family.
In Sweden, Bauer lived first in Gothenburg and then in Stockholm. He learned Swedish, supported himself by teaching law students and doing archival work, and in his spare time wrote books on subjects ranging from economics to Napoleon. In Stockholm he founded the periodical Sozialistische Tribüne together with the future West German chancellor Willy Brandt and other exiles.
Even before the war ended, Bauer was working out how Nazi crimes should be judged. In 1945 he published Die Kriegsverbrecher vor Gericht, War Criminals in Court, in Zurich, with an afterword by the Swiss jurist Hans Felix Pfenninger. Its title stated the cause he would pursue for the rest of his life: those who had committed crimes for the Nazi state should answer for them before a court of law.
Prosecuting Nazi crimes became the central purpose of his career. When he returned to Germany in 1949 with support from the Social Democratic leader Kurt Schumacher, he regarded the judicial prosecution of Nazi crimes as fundamental to establishing a democratic system of justice. He served as a regional court director and then, from 1950, attorney general in Braunschweig, and from 1956 until his death in 1968 as attorney general of Hesse in Frankfurt, where he helped bring Adolf Eichmann and the staff of Auschwitz to trial.
His early book has not been forgotten. In 2026 the Fritz Bauer Institute published a new edition as the first volume of a series of his writings, with free online access, so that the ideas he formed in exile can be read by a new generation.
Why it matters
Bauer's wartime thinking laid the groundwork for his later prosecutions, which helped make accountability for Nazi crimes part of West German democracy.
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 brought the Auschwitz trial to FrankfurtFritz Bauer initiated the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial of 1963–65, in which 319 witnesses, including 181 camp survivors, testified about the crimes of the death camp.
- 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
- 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.