Fritz Bauer

Fritz Bauer, born on July 16, 1903 in Stuttgart, Germany -- died on July 1, 1968 in Frankfurt am Main, was a German judge and prosecutor.

Life

Bauer, who was Jewish, studied business and law in Heidelberg, Munich and Tübingen. After receiving his Doctorate of Laws degree, Bauer became an assessor judge in the Stuttgart local district court. By 1920, he had already joined the Social Democratic Party. Due to his membership in the SPD and his Jewish heritage, he was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1933, and a short time later he was dismissed from his civil service position.

In 1935, Bauer emigrated to Denmark and then to Sweden after the former was occupied by German troops during the Second World War. In Sweden, Bauer founded, along with Willy Brandt, the periodical Sozialistische Tribüne (Socialist Tribune). Bauer returned to Germany in 1949, as the postwar Federal Republic was being established, and once more entered civil service in the justice system. At first he became director of the district courts, and later the equivalent of District Attorney in Braunschweig. In 1956, he was appointed to office as the District Attorney in Hesse, based in Frankfurt. Bauer held this position until his death in 1968.

Bauer was active in the ongoing 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 Auschwitz Trial, the proceedings of which opened in 1963.

With Gerhard Szczesny, Bauer founded the Humanistic Union, a human-rights organization, in 1961. After Bauer's death, the Union donated money to fund the Fritz Bauer Prize. In addition, the Fritz Bauer Institut, founded in 1995, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to civil rights that focuses on history and the effect of the Holocaust.

Fritz Bauer's work contributed to the building of a democratic justice system in Germany, as well as to the consistent, lawful prosecution of Nazi injustices and the reform of the criminal law and penal systems. Without Bauer's persistent involvement, the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt might never have come to fruition.

Within the postwar German justice system, Bauer was a controversial figure due to his sociopolitical engagement. He supposedly once said, "In the justice system, I live as in exile."

Works

• Das Verbrechen und Gesellschaft. Reinhardt 1957
• Sexualität und Verbrechen. Fischer 1963
• Die neue Gewalt. Verl. d. Zeitschrift Ruf u. Echo 1964
• Widerstand gegen die Staatsgewalt. Fischer 1965
• Die Humanität der Rechtsordnung. Ausgewählte Schriften. Hrsg. von Joachim Perels und Irmtrud Wojak, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, New York 1998, ISBN 3-593-35841-7

Literature

• Wojak, Irmtrud: Fritz Bauer und die Aufarbeitung der NS-Verbrechen nach 1945. Blickpunkt Hessen, Hessische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, Nr. 2/2003 online

External Links

• (http://www.fritz-bauer-institut.de) Fritz Bauer Institute
• Irmtrud Wojak: Fritz Bauer - Stationen eines Lebens