- Person
- Fritz Bauer
- Lived
- 1903–1968
- Field
- Prosecutor & Jurist
- From
- German
The story
Fritz Bauer began his career as a judge in Stuttgart in the late 1920s and watched his Weimar-era colleagues hand the lightest sentences to violent Nazis and the harshest to their opponents. He came to see that biased courts had helped prepare the way for dictatorship. After surviving a concentration camp and years of exile, he returned to Germany in 1949 determined to help build a democratic judiciary.
His work in West Germany was devoted to three goals: an independent democratic justice system, the consistent prosecution of Nazi crimes, and the reform of criminal law and prisons. His main book, Das Verbrechen und die Gesellschaft (Crime and Society), published in 1957, questioned whether free will could be the basis of criminal guilt. Drawing on the reformers Franz von Liszt and Gustav Radbruch, he argued for a criminal law that dropped punishment for its own sake and relied instead on measures to rehabilitate offenders and protect society.
He also wrote on sexuality and crime, co-editing a 1963 volume of contributions to criminal law reform, and argued that the state needed effective checks on its own power. He saw the right to resist injustice as part of a citizen's duty, a theme he developed in a 1965 collection of documents on resistance to state power.
In 1961 Bauer was among the founders of the Humanist Union, a civil liberties organisation, together with the journalist Gerhard Szczesny. In 1968 the union established the Fritz Bauer Prize, awarded for contributions to making the legal system more humane, liberal and democratic.
At Bauer's initiative, the first sentence of Article 1 of Germany's Basic Law, which declares that human dignity shall be inviolable, was mounted on the building of the Frankfurt prosecutor's office, and a similar inscription was placed in Braunschweig, where he had earlier served as attorney general.
Fittingly for a reformer of the prison system, the Darmstadt prison has also been given the name Fritz-Bauer-Haus.
Why it matters
Bauer's ideas helped steer German justice toward human dignity and rehabilitation, values still honoured by the prize that bears his name.
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 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 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 (German)
- Fritz Bauer Wikipedia
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.