- Person
- Fritz Bauer
- Lived
- 1903–1968
- Field
- Prosecutor & Jurist
- From
- German
The story
Fritz Bauer was born in Stuttgart on July 16, 1903, to a liberal Jewish family. His father ran a textile business. He studied law and economics at Heidelberg, Munich and Tübingen, where, since most student fraternities excluded Jews, he joined a liberal Jewish student association and threw himself into its political debates. He joined the Social Democratic Party in 1920.
After earning a doctorate in law, he became a judicial assessor at the Stuttgart district court in 1928 and in 1930 a local district judge, the youngest in the Weimar Republic. He was the only judge in Württemberg who belonged to the Social Democratic Party and one of only two Jewish judges in the state. He co-founded the Republican Judges' Association in Württemberg, a group of lawyers loyal to the democratic constitution.
Bauer watched with alarm as fellow judges, most of whom despised the republic, gave lenient sentences to Nazi street fighters and harsh ones to their left-wing opponents. He believed this bias encouraged Nazi violence. In 1931 he became chairman of the Stuttgart branch of the Reichsbanner, an organisation formed to defend parliamentary democracy, and after right-wing parties formed the Harzburg Front that October, he was one of the driving forces behind the Iron Front to defend the republic.
With the Social Democratic politician Kurt Schumacher, a badly wounded war veteran, he travelled across Württemberg speaking at rallies, often several times every weekend, urging people to defend the Weimar Constitution. Even a hostile Nazi report admitted that he had an accessible and appealing speaking style. A Nazi newspaper attacked him as a Jew and a Social Democrat, and in late 1931 he was moved from criminal to civil cases.
On March 23, 1933, weeks after the Nazis took power, police arrested Bauer at his office. He was held for eight months in the Heuberg and Oberer Kuhberg concentration camps, beaten and humiliated by guards, then dismissed as a judge under the new law purging the civil service.
He never gave up the cause. After the war he returned to the justice system to build the democratic judiciary he had fought for as a young man, and Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier later called him one of the key figures of the young democracy.
Why it matters
Bauer's early stand showed that some judges were willing to risk everything to defend democracy and the rule of law.
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'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.
Sources
- Fritz Bauer Wikipedia
- Fritz Bauer Wikipedia (German)
- Fritz Bauer Fritz Bauer Institut
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.