A liberal Jewish boyhood in Stuttgart
Fritz Bauer was born on July 16, 1903, in Stuttgart, the son of Ludwig Bauer, who ran a textile business, and Ella Bauer, née Hirsch. He had a younger sister, Margot. The family belonged to the assimilated German-Jewish middle class that believed deeply in its own Germanness: they did not celebrate Christmas but kept the Jewish holidays, and Margot later described their upbringing as “liberally Jewish.”
Bauer studied law and economics at the universities of Heidelberg, Munich and Tübingen, earning a doctorate. At university he joined a liberal Jewish student fraternity, and as a young man he joined the Social Democratic Party. The combination, Jewish, socialist, and passionately committed to the rule of law, would define his life and make him, in post-war Germany, both indispensable and deeply resented.
The youngest judge in the Republic
After qualifying as a court assessor in 1928, Bauer became a district judge in Stuttgart around 1930, reportedly the youngest judge in the Weimar Republic. He did not share the outlook of most of his colleagues, who he said came from highly elitist student fraternities, and he criticised the judiciary for its leniency towards Nazi street violence.
He was also politically active in defence of democracy, leading the Stuttgart branch of the Reichsbanner, the republican paramilitary organisation allied to the Social Democrats, and taking part in the anti-Nazi Iron Front. In 1931, after attacks on him by the Nazis, he was moved from criminal to civil cases.
Prison, exile and escape
Weeks after Hitler came to power, in March 1933, Bauer was arrested, dismissed as a judge and held for months in the Heuberg and Oberer Kuhberg concentration camps. He was released in November 1933 after signing a declaration of loyalty to the new regime, a concession he bitterly regretted for the rest of his life.
In 1936 he fled to Denmark. After the German occupation of the country in April 1940 the Danish authorities revoked his residence permit and interned him for three months; in June 1943 he entered a formal marriage with a Danish kindergarten teacher, Anna Maria Petersen, for his protection, and in October 1943, as the Germans began deporting Denmark’s Jews, he went into hiding and was carried to Sweden with the help of Danish rescuers. There he worked with the young exiled Social Democrat Willy Brandt, with whom he co-founded the periodical Sozialistische Tribüne. In 1943 his parents, his sister, her husband and their two sons also escaped to Sweden by fishing boat. Others in the family did not survive: in 1941 Stuttgart police arrested his cousin Erich Hirsch and his aunt Paula Hirsch, who were deported to Riga and shot.
Return to a country that did not want to remember
In 1949, the year the Federal Republic was founded, Bauer came back to Germany with the support of the Social Democratic leader Kurt Schumacher. Already in exile he had written on how war criminals should be tried, in a book published in Danish and German in 1945. He became a senior judge at the regional court in Braunschweig and, in 1950, chief prosecutor at the higher regional court there.
It was in Braunschweig that he first made history. In 1952 he prosecuted Otto Ernst Remer, the officer who had helped crush the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler and who now, as a leader of a far-right party, denounced the conspirators as traitors. Bauer turned the trial into a judgement on the Nazi state itself. That state, he argued, had been an Unrechtsstaat, a state of injustice, and a regime committing tens of thousands of murders a day gave everyone the right of self-defence. The court, ruling on March 15, 1952, accepted this view, and the case became a turning point in the rehabilitation of the German resistance, whose members had until then often been treated as traitors.
The Eichmann secret
In 1956 Georg-August Zinn, the Social Democratic premier of Hesse, brought Bauer to Frankfurt as the state’s attorney general. Soon afterwards he received extraordinary information. Lothar Hermann, a former concentration-camp prisoner living in Argentina, had realised that the young man courting his daughter, Klaus Eichmann, was the son of Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who had organised the deportation of Europe’s Jews to the death camps. Further evidence, including Eichmann’s address, later reached Bauer through other channels, and in December 1959 he travelled to Jerusalem to hand it over without revealing his source; David Ben-Gurion then ordered Eichmann’s capture.
Bauer did not trust the West German police or judiciary, which were full of former Nazis, not to warn Eichmann. So in 1957 he did something that, had it been known, could have ended his career: he passed the information directly to Isser Harel, the head of Israel’s Mossad. His lead was vital to the Israeli operation that seized Eichmann in Buenos Aires in May 1960 and brought him to trial in Jerusalem in 1961. When Bauer asked the German government to seek Eichmann’s extradition, it declined. His role remained secret until long after his death.
Auschwitz on trial in Frankfurt
Bauer’s greatest undertaking was at home. Rather than leave Nazi crimes to scattered local prosecutions, he secured in 1958 the consolidation of the many Auschwitz cases into a single great proceeding in Frankfurt. His team of young prosecutors assembled the evidence, and on December 20, 1963, the trial of twenty-two members of the camp’s SS staff opened in Frankfurt. It ran until August 19, 1965. Hundreds of witnesses testified, among them around two hundred survivors. Six defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment; others received prison terms of between three and fourteen years, and some were acquitted.
Unlike the Nuremberg trials, this was Germans trying Germans in German courts, and Bauer deliberately pursued not only commanders but ordinary functionaries, guards, medical orderlies, clerks, to show how the machinery of murder depended on many hands. He saw the trial as a lesson for the nation in self-examination. Yet he was disappointed by the result: the press, he felt, cast the accused as monsters, allowing ordinary Germans to avoid asking what they themselves had done. He also pressed investigations into the Nazi “euthanasia” killings, but the cases against leading doctors never reached trial.
“Enemy territory”
Bauer paid a price for his work. A controversial figure because of his politics as well as his mission, he was isolated within a legal establishment in which many judges and prosecutors had served the Nazi regime. Remarks attributed to him capture the loneliness: that in the justice system he lived as if in exile, and that when he left his office he stepped into enemy territory.
He was also a reformer of criminal law. His main book, Das Verbrechen und die Gesellschaft (Crime and Society, 1957), questioned free will as a foundation for punishment and argued for a penal system aimed at rehabilitation and public safety rather than retribution. He campaigned to reform Paragraph 175, the law criminalising homosexuality, and co-founded the Humanist Union, a civil-liberties organisation. Danish police files from his exile years record suspicions of homosexuality; his biographer Ronen Steinke argues that Bauer was probably gay, while others regard the evidence as thin.
Bauer’s Jewishness was a matter of origin and fate rather than faith: born to liberal Jewish parents, he regarded himself as an atheist. Yet he supported reconciliation with Israel, sitting from 1959 on the board of a German–Israeli study group in Frankfurt. He spoke tirelessly to young people about the roots of Nazism; when, in 1962, the education ministry of Rhineland-Palatinate refused to distribute one of his lectures to schools, a young CDU politician named Helmut Kohl defended the decision on the grounds that it was too soon to judge. On Bauer’s initiative, the first sentence of the Basic Law, “Human dignity shall be inviolable”, was placed on the building of the Frankfurt prosecutor’s office.
A sudden death
On July 1, 1968, Fritz Bauer was found dead in the bathtub of his Frankfurt apartment, aged sixty-four. A post-mortem found alcohol and sleeping pills in his system. At his own request he was cremated, contrary to Jewish tradition, and his ashes were laid in his parents’ grave in the Jewish section of the Östra kyrkogården cemetery in Gothenburg, Sweden, the country that had given his family refuge. A planned trial over the Nazi euthanasia programme that he had prepared never took place.
Legacy
For decades after his death Bauer was half-forgotten. Then, as Germany came to see confronting its past as a national duty, he was rediscovered as one of its pioneers. The Fritz Bauer Institute, a centre for the study of the Holocaust and its impact, was founded in Frankfurt in 1995. Films including Labyrinth of Lies (2014) and The People vs. Fritz Bauer (2015) brought his story to wide audiences, and streets, squares and schools now bear his name. In 2018 Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier led a commemoration in his honour at Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, and in 2019 Deutsche Post issued a stamp in his memory.
His achievement was to insist, against the wishes of much of his own society, that the crimes of the Nazi state were crimes, committed by identifiable people who could be named and judged in German courts. The Auschwitz trial put the reality of the death camps before the West German public, and the principle he argued in Braunschweig, that resistance to a criminal state is legitimate, became part of the foundations of German democracy. A German Jew who had been driven out, he came back to make his country look at itself.
Sources & further reading
Fritz Bauer, Wikipedia · Fritz Bauer, Fritz Bauer Institut · Fritz Bauer, Wikipedia (German) · Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.