Fritz Bauer


Fritz Bauer was a German Jewish judge and prosecutor. He was instrumental in the post-war capture of former Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann and also played an essential role in starting the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials.

Life and work

Bauer was born in Stuttgart, to Jewish parents, Ella and Ludwig Bauer. He attended Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium and studied business and law at the Universities of Heidelberg, Munich and Tübingen.
In 1928, after receiving his PhD in law, Bauer became an assessor judge in the Stuttgart local district court. By 1920, he already had joined the Social Democratic Party. In the early 1930s, Bauer was, together with Kurt Schumacher, one of the leaders of the SPD's Reichsbanner defense league in Stuttgart. In May 1933, soon after the Nazi seizure of power, a plan to organize a general strike against the Nazis in the Stuttgart region failed, and Schumacher and Bauer were arrested with others and taken to Heuberg concentration camp. The more prominent and older Schumacher, who had been an outspoken opponent of the Nazis as an SPD deputy in the Reichstag, remained in concentration camps until the end of World War II, whereas the young and largely unknown Bauer was released. A short time later Bauer, like most Jews, was dismissed from his civil service position.
In 1935, Bauer emigrated to Denmark. After the German occupation, the Danish authorities revoked his residence permit in April 1940 and interned him in a camp for three months. To protect himself, he formally married the Danish kindergarten teacher Anna Maria Petersen, in June 1943. In October 1942, he fled to Sweden after the Danish government resigned and the Nazis declared martial law which endangered the Jewish population in Denmark. The fact that Bauer was a homosexual – a fact that he was careful to keep to himself – placed him in even further peril should he remain in Germany or in Nazi-occupied Denmark. In Sweden Bauer founded, along with Willy Brandt, the periodical Sozialistische Tribüne. Bauer returned to Germany in 1949, as the postwar Federal Republic was being established, and once more entered the civil service in the justice system. At first he became director of the district courts, and later the equivalent of a U.S. district attorney, in Braunschweig. In 1956, he was appointed the district attorney in Hessen, based in Frankfurt a. M. Bauer held this position until his death in 1968.
In 1957, Bauer relayed information about the whereabouts in Argentina of fugitive Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann to Israeli Intelligence that allowed Eichmann to be captured. Bauer thus was instrumental in bringing him to trial in Israel in 1960. Bauer also was active in the postwar efforts to obtain justice and compensation for victims of the Nazi regime. In 1958, he succeeded in getting a class action lawsuit certified, consolidating numerous individual claims in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, which opened in 1963.
In 1968, working with German journalist Gerhard Szczesny, Bauer founded the Humanist Union, a human-rights organization. After Bauer's death, the Union donated money to endow the Fritz Bauer Prize. Another organization, the Fritz Bauer Institute, founded in 1995, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to civil rights that focuses on history and the effects of the Holocaust.
Fritz Bauer's work contributed to the creation of an independent, democratic justice system in West Germany, as well as to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals and the reform of the criminal law and penal systems.
Within the postwar German justice system, Bauer was a controversial figure due to his political engagements. He once said, "In the justice system, I live as in exile."
Bauer died in Frankfurt am Main, aged 64. He was found drowned in his bathtub. A post mortem examination found that he had taken alcohol and sleeping tablets.

Works