The German newspapers pointed out at the end of 1918 that the next day, November 9, at eleven in the morning, the Revolution would begin. Fritz Bauer, who was then a socially concerned boy, did not want to miss it. He lived in Stuttgart, and headed to the main artery of the city center to see what was happening. Nothing happened. “We walked up and down the street, a shot rang out in the distance, very far away, I felt tremendously unhappy because the German Revolution, as always, would take place in the halls,” he later commented during an interview for a documentary that aired on television.
On that famous occasion Bauer was 16 years old, but he was already touched by that humanist vocation that would later lead him to make a profound change in the Germany that emerged after Hitler's defeat. His legal considerations on the need for an international criminal court served the Allies to support the Nuremberg trials against the Nazi leaders, but his most important task was to persecute in Germany those who participated in the war. final solution, even if the country made an effort to draw a thick veil over its recent past. In 1963, after five years of rigorous and meticulous investigations, he was the prosecutor who launched the Auschwitz Trials in Frankfurt, which showed in detail and in all its crudeness the way in which the murderous machinery of the Third Reich proceeded.
Bauer, who was part of an assimilated Jewish family that had done quite well, began studying law in 1921 in Heidelberg. He moved to Munich a year later. The defeat of the German empire in the Great War had generated strong anti-Semitic currents that manifested themselves in a virulent way during those years. A handful of ultranationalist fanatics assassinated Walther Rathenau, the foreign minister, the most serious crisis of the Weimar Republic, and in 1923 the putsch of Hitler. Bauer had joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and, when he finished his studies in 1926, he abandoned his academic career to dedicate himself to politics and work as a criminal judge. He was already clear about his interests: “he did not want to be a guardian of order, but rather a defender of human rights,” he points out. Irmtrud Wojakthe person responsible for the biography that has just been translated and that rescues the impressive career of a jurist who was instrumental in turning Germany into a rule of law after the Nazi nightmare.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, Bauer was arrested and transferred to a concentration camp where he spent eight months.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, Bauer was arrested and transferred to a concentration camp where he spent eight months. He managed to go to Copenhagen, there he made a living as a commercial representative and was involved in political tasks with the SPD. He left Denmark when the Nazis persecuted the Jews there and settled in Sweden, where he worked as a journalist and connected with Willy Brandt. He was not able to return to Germany until 1949. He began as a judge and prosecutor in Brunswick, where he already prosecuted some crimes against humanity, and in 1956 he became the attorney general of Hesse. From Frankfurt he piloted some of the most relevant initiatives against Nazi criminals. His work was decisive in catching Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires and he also pursued, without success, Walter Bormann, the right hand of Hitler, and Josef Mengele. He launched the great Auschwitz Trials, brought to trial judges, lawyers and doctors who participated in euthanasia murders during the Third Reich (without achieving much), prosecuted Nazi crimes in Hungary and German diplomats who were complicit in murdering Greek Jews and “new Bulgarians”, he prosecuted members of the death squads —Einsatzgruppen—who collaborated in the final solution as in the terrible atrocity of Babi Yar, near kyiv.
Fritz Bauer carried out a titanic job and he did it in the midst of immense difficulties, incessant death threats, and criticism. Little is known about his private life; It has been written that his was “a lonely existence, difficult to endure.” He never ceased in his task of punishing Nazi crimes, but his desire was not resentful or vengeful, as those who fought him claimed: he wanted to build a new Germany that would overcome the ignominy of the final solution. In the end I was very tired. On July 1, 1968, he was found dead in his bathtub. The autopsy indicated that it was a heart attack, but speculation about his death was abundant.
Irmtrud Wojak
Translation by Gonzalo Tamames González and Sara Han Díaz Lorenzo
Editing and presentation by Joaquín González Ibáñez
Prologue by Antonio Muñoz Molina
Berg Institute, 2023
720 pages. 42 euros
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