- Person
- Fritz Bauer
- Lived
- 1903–1968
- Field
- Prosecutor & Jurist
- From
- German
The story
On July 20, 1944, Wehrmacht officers tried to kill Hitler with a bomb planted by Claus von Stauffenberg and to seize power in Berlin. Major Otto Ernst Remer commanded the guard battalion in the capital that day. Sent to arrest Joseph Goebbels, he was put through by telephone to Hitler, who ordered him to crush the coup, and he did. After the war Remer co-founded the far-right Socialist Reich Party, which was banned in 1952.
At a party rally in May 1951, Remer called the July 20 conspirators traitors paid by foreign powers. The federal interior minister, Robert Lehr, who had been close to the resistance leader Carl Goerdeler, filed a criminal complaint. The senior prosecutor in Braunschweig, a former Nazi party member, at first refused to take the case. Fritz Bauer, then attorney general in Braunschweig, intervened, ordered that the case go ahead, and took on the prosecution himself.
The week-long trial in March 1952 drew enormous public attention. Bauer deliberately framed it as a judgment on the Nazi regime itself. He argued that a lawless state that commits tens of thousands of murders every day entitles anyone to act in self-defence. Expert opinions from Protestant and Catholic theologians and a former general supported the prosecution, all concluding that the resisters had acted for the good of Germany, not betrayed it.
The court accepted Bauer's view that the Nazi regime had been not a state governed by law but an Unrechtsstaat, a state of injustice. Remer was sentenced to three months in prison and later fled abroad. The judgment declared that the conspirators had acted out of love of their country and a selfless sense of responsibility to their people, and that not a shadow of suspicion remained that any had been paid by a foreign power.
As a result, the resistance fighters of July 20 were legally and morally rehabilitated. Before the trial, Stauffenberg's widow had even been refused an officer's widow's pension. Public opinion shifted too: a few months before the trial only 38 percent of West Germans approved of the plot, while nine months after it 58 percent said the conspirators were not traitors.
It was one of Bauer's first major cases as attorney general, it made him known beyond Germany, and the jurist Rudolf Wassermann later called it the most important political trial between Nuremberg and the Auschwitz trial.
Why it matters
The Remer trial gave postwar Germany an honoured tradition of resistance and established in court that the Nazi state had no legitimate claim on anyone's obedience.
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 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 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
- Otto Ernst Remer Wikipedia
- Remer-Prozess 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.