Fritz Bauer

Fritz Bauer (16 July 1903 – 1 July 1968) was a German Jewish judge and prosecutor.

He played an instrumental role in the post-war capture of former Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann and the beginning of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials.

Bauer was born in Stuttgart, to a Jewish family.

His parents were Ella (Hirsch) and Ludwig Bauer.

Bauer remembered that the judges of Württemberg almost down to a man loathed the Weimar Republic, which they believed was born of the stab-in-the-back myth of 1918 committed by "godless and unpatriotic scoundrels. The judges weren't at all fond of the republic and they used the guise of judicial independence to sabotage the new state".

Bauer felt the political biases of the judiciary—who had an unwritten rule under the Weimar republic that violence committed by the right was acceptable—was the "judicial overture" to their actions under the Nazi regime.

By 1920, he already had joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Bauer found himself feeling at home in Stuttgart, a city with a left-wing working class majority that had a reputation as a "progressive" city where Weimar culture flourished.

In 1928, after receiving his PhD in law (at 25, Doktor der Rechte [Jur.Dr.] in Germany), Bauer became an assessor judge in the Stuttgart local district court.

The city council of Stuttgart was dominated by the Social Democrats while the Nazis won only 1.1% of the vote in the Stuttgart municipal election of 1928.

However, Bauer was the only judge in Württemberg who was a member of the SPD and one of the only two Jewish judges in Württemberg.

He was much an outsider in the Württemberg judiciary.

Bauer recalled later about the other judges in Württemberg: "They came from the highly elitist student fraternities and members of the reserve officers' corps. Their entire outlook was conservative and authoritarian in spirit. The Kaiser had gone, but the generals, public officials and judges remained".

Bauer found himself appalled by the way that the other judges in Württemberg flagrantly favored the Nazis, always imposing the most lenient sentences on Nazis who engaged in violence and the harshest possible sentences on Communists and Social Democrats who did the same.

Bauer believed that this favoritism towards the Nazis encouraged their violence.

Bauer's father was a successful businessman who ran a textile mill that provided him with an annual income of by 1930 (for comparison, the annual income of a typical doctor in Germany in 1930 was ).

His sister Margot called their childhood a "liberally Jewish one".

Though his family was assimilated into the German culture, his parents did not celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday (a common practice in Jewish homes in Stuttgart at the time), and insisted on celebrating Jewish holidays.

He attended Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium in Stuttgart, and studied business and law at the Universities of Heidelberg, Munich and Tübingen.

German universities were traditionally strongholds of the völkisch movement, and almost all student fraternities in Germany under völkisch influence refused to accept Jews as members.

Accordingly, Bauer found himself joining the liberal Jewish fraternity FWV (Freie Wissenschaftliche Vereinigung – Free Academic Union) in Heidelberg, to which he devoted much of his time.

The only other major Jewish fraternity were the Zionists, whose views Bauer opposed.

In the early 1930s, Bauer was together with Kurt Schumacher, one of the leaders of the SPD's Reichsbanner defense league in Stuttgart.

Bauer served as the chairman of the Stuttgart chapter of the Reichsbanner and from 1931 onward found himself engaged in a feud with Dietrich von Jagow, the SA leader for Southwestern Germany.

In late 1931, Bauer was demoted from a judge handling criminal cases to a judge handling civil cases following accusations from the Nazi journalist Adolf Gerlach in the local Stuttgart Nazi newspaper NS-Kurier that Bauer was biased because he was a Jew and a Social Democrat who discussed details of the trial with a journalist from the Social Democratic newspaper Tagwacht.

At the hearing in response to Gerlach's complaint, Bauer argued the details of the case involving a local con-man on trial for cheating others of their money had already been discussed in the court, so he had not violated any rules by speaking to a journalist and the case was not political.

At the hearing, the judges ruled that Bauer had failed to "comply with existing regulations", thereby implying that Gerlach's accusations were partly justified and only declined to dismiss him because it could not be proved that Bauer's actions were "politically motivated".

Following the demotion, Bauer contacted Schumacher, a highly decorated World War One veteran who lost his arm who served as the editor of the Social Democratic newspaper Schwäbische Tagwacht, about the need to drum up an anti-Nazi movement.

Schumacher told Bauer: "We don't need intellectuals. Workers don't like intellectuals".

Finally, Schumacher agreed to send Bauer to speak at a SPD rally, where Bauer gave what he called "a talk which went down rather well, I must admit".

Bauer had a "deep, roaring voice" that electrified audiences and even a hostile Nazi account admitted he had "an accessible and very appealing style of expression".

Schumacher in turn was, despite his grotesque appearance owing to his war wounds, one of the most popular Social Democrats in Württemberg, as one lawyer recalled: "He was like Churchill, chain-smoking cigarettes and puffing on cigars. You could sense his resolve and unwavering belief in the absolute righteousness of his cause".

Schumacher and Bauer travelled across Württemberg giving speeches as Bauer recalled: "He and I spoke every weekend, sometimes three, four or five times. We were urging people to defend the Weimar Constitution, but also combat the extremism of the Weimar era".

The rallies usually ended with people shouting Frei-Heil! (Hail Freedom!) which was intended to mock the Nazi slogan Sieg Heil! (Hail Victory!).

As Schumacher was also a Social Democratic MdR, he had to spend much time in Berlin attending the sessions of the Reichstag, causing him to resign as a chairman of the Stuttgart chapter of the Reichsbanner in favor of Bauer.

After the Harzburg Front was founded in October 1931, Bauer was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Iron Front, whose stated purpose was to defend democracy.

On 8 March 1933, Jagow was appointed police commissioner for Württemberg.

On 23 March 1933, while Bauer was at work in his office, a group of policemen arrived to arrest him without charges.

In March 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.

Bauer was tormented by the SA guards at Heuberg who found various ways to humiliate him and often beat him.