- Person
- Fritz Bauer
- Lived
- 1903–1968
- Field
- Prosecutor & Jurist
- From
- German
The story
Fritz Bauer, a German Jewish lawyer who had survived the Nazi era in exile, became attorney general of the state of Hesse in 1956. Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who had organised the deportation of Jews across Europe to the death camps, had escaped to Argentina after the war and was living there under a false identity.
In 1957 Bauer heard from Lothar Hermann, a former concentration camp prisoner living in Argentina, that Eichmann was there. Hermann's daughter Sylvia had been dating a young man named Klaus Eichmann, who boasted about his father's wartime exploits. When she visited the family home, Klaus addressed the older man as Father.
Bauer did not trust West Germany's police or courts, fearing someone would warn Eichmann. When he asked the federal government to seek Eichmann's extradition, it refused at once. Instead he passed the information directly to Israel, through the Israeli mission in Cologne and to Mossad director Isser Harel. Mossad agents watched the address, but at first could not confirm the identification.
The decisive evidence came later. In 2021 it emerged that the geologist Gerhard Klammer, who had worked with Eichmann at a construction firm in Argentina in the early 1950s, had learned his exact address in Buenos Aires in 1959. Through church contacts, including Bishop Hermann Kunst, the address and a photograph reached Bauer in November 1959. In December Bauer handed this evidence to Israeli officials in Jerusalem without revealing his source, and shortly afterwards Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered Eichmann's capture.
Harel later acknowledged Bauer's important role and said Bauer pressed insistently for Israel to act. Bauer had discreet help from Hesse's minister-president, Georg-August Zinn. Mossad agents seized Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 and brought him to Israel, where his trial in Jerusalem in 1961 brought the story of the Holocaust to a worldwide audience.
Bauer kept his part, and his sources, secret. Zinn's help became public only in 1997, and Klammer's role only in 2021, long after Bauer's death in 1968.
Why it matters
Bauer's courage in going around his own government made possible the trial that brought the Holocaust to the attention of the whole 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 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 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 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.