Review: Jack Fairweather’s “The Prosecutor”

This is a review. The author is responsible for the opinions in the text.

Homosexual, Jew and hunted by the Nazis: Fritz Bauer. Heard of him? Without Bauer, posterity would not have known about the unusual existence of Auschwitz, would not have seen the super-Nazi Adolf Eichmann on trial and would not have been confronted with a Germany that is coming to terms with its Nazi history and its responsibility for the genocide of European Jews and Roma.

It’s big – but apparently it takes a British journalist for a book about Fritz Bauer to attract attention in the Anglo-Saxon world. “The Prosecutor: The Man Who Brought the Nazis to Justice” by Jack Fairweather has been praised in Britain and the United States and is now available in Swedish. The accolades are a bit exaggerated, but Bauer’s work is deeply impressive and the depiction of post-war Germany is well worth reading.

Fritz Bauer, who was born Born in 1903 and raised in Stuttgart, he was not only Jewish and homosexual, but also a socialist. During the Weimar Republic he was Germany’s youngest judge, but after the Nazis came to power he was sent to a concentration camp because of his political views. In 1936 he fled to live with a sister in Copenhagen and also managed to bring his parents to Denmark. The family members who remained in Stuttgart were deported to Riga and murdered.

In Denmark, homosexuality was legal, but prostitution was illegal. Bauer was accused of buying sex (he denied this) and ended up on the Danish police register. When the Nazis occupied the country in 1940, he was sentenced to a prison camp because of his sexual orientation. When the Nazis wanted to liberate Denmark from the Jews in October 1943, Bauer and his parents fled again, this time on a rickety fishing boat across the Öresund to Sweden.

He makes it his life’s mission to bring Nazis to justice. But he is not enthusiastic about his work, on the contrary

It was not until 1948 that Fritz Bauer returned to Germany and became a public prosecutor in the state of Hesse, convinced that the newly born democracy of the Federal Republic would not survive without dealing with the crimes of the Nazi regime, and he made it his life’s work to bring Nazis to justice. But he is not enthusiastic about his work, on the contrary. The justice system, the entire post-war Germany, is full of criminals who don’t want their crimes to be exposed. Bauer is monitored, fought against and threatened with death.

West Germany’s first leader, Konrad Adenauer disliked Nazis but had no interest in solving their crimes. His priority was rebuilding the nation and restoring Germany’s status as a free world power, and his closest collaborator was the lawyer Hans Globke. The same Globke wrote the Emergency Law that gave Adolf Hitler unlimited power, did the groundwork for two of the three anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, and proposed forcing all German Jews to take the first names Sara or Israel. The desire to curb Fritz Bauer’s Nazi hunt therefore reached up to the highest levels of power in the country.

Bauer therefore contacted Israel so that the Nazi Eichmann could be arrested and later brought to justice in Jerusalem

When Bauer found out about Adolf Eichmann’s speech in Argentina, the resistance came to a head. (For those who share philosopher Hannah Arendt’s opinion of Eichmann as a banal desk murderer, I may remind you that there are records from his time in Argentina in which he states that his only regret is that more Jews were not murdered and that the deportation of over four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz was “an unprecedented achievement.”)

Bauer therefore contacted Israel so that the Nazi could be arrested and later tried in Jerusalem – and here comes Fairweather with startling insights into the reality of the Cold War. For example, the GDR and other communist countries only wanted to open their Eichmann archives on the condition that Israel renounced the capitalist system. And Konrad Adenauer resorted to blackmail at the highest level: Hans Globke had to be kept out of the process, otherwise West Germany would withdraw its 500 million in aid for Israel’s nuclear weapons program.

Fritz Bauer is perhaps the greatest The effort was the trial of 25 “middle managers” in Auschwitz from 1963 to 1965. The aim was, among other things, to change the legal definition of murder, which, according to the German Criminal Code, meant that perpetrators could only be convicted for individual murders and if there was proven intent to kill. But Bauer wanted to show that “everyone who worked in that death machine, no matter what they did, was guilty of accessory to murder… from the guard to the highest level.”

The goal didn’t go as planned. Some were convicted of murder, others of minor crimes, and five were acquitted. Nobody showed any remorse. But the victims’ statements shocked the German public and Auschwitz became a reference point for the most brutal things one person can do to another.

In Germany he became a role model for a new generation of lawyers, educators and journalists

In the summer of 1968, Fritz Bauer was found dead in his house, presumably due to a heart attack. Just three months later, the statute of limitations for Nazi crimes came into force and Bauer’s plans to prosecute those responsible for the Nazi euthanasia program were put on hold. Nevertheless, his actions left a big impression.

In Germany, he became a role model for a new generation of lawyers, educators and journalists, who in turn changed public discussion and the way German schools passed on knowledge about the Holocaust. One of them was the German-Swedish writer Peter Weiss, who followed the Auschwitz trial and created an oratorio based on the testimonies. “The Investigation” premiered in 1965 in fourteen West and East German cities, had a huge impact and sparked a crucial debate about the Holocaust.

Although it is interesting In terms of content, Jack Fairweather’s book has clear deficiencies. Hardly a single woman is included – the brave Dane Anna Maria Petersen, who married Bauer to protect him from persecution, is mentioned only once, even though they were lifelong friends. The language is somewhat rough and ill-thought out, for example the term “Final Solution” used by the Nazi murderers is used without quotation marks – incomprehensible and immoral at the same time. But at a time when knowledge of the Holocaust breeds indifference, The Prosecutor is an important read.

And Fritz Bauer? The world was better because of him. Those who wish can visit the old Örgryte cemetery, where he is buried next to his parents, and pay a posthumous bow.

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