32 Facts About Fritz Bauer

Fritz Bauer was a German Jewish judge and prosecutor.

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

Fritz Bauer attended Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium in Stuttgart, and studied business and law at the Universities of Heidelberg, Munich and Tubingen.

Accordingly, Fritz Bauer found himself joining the liberal Jewish fraternity FWV in Heidelberg, to which he devoted much of his time.

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

Fritz Bauer was much an outsider in the Wurttemberg judiciary.

Fritz Bauer found himself appalled by the way that the other judges in Wurttemberg 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.

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

Fritz 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, Fritz 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 Fritz 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, Fritz 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 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 Fritz 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 Fritz Bauer's actions were "politically motivated".

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

Fritz 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".

On 23 March 1933, while Fritz 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 Fritz Bauer were arrested with others and taken to Heuberg concentration camp.

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

The man whom Fritz Bauer consistently praised in his recollections of Heuberg was Schumacher, who despite missing one of his arms and being in constant pain because of his war wounds, was unyielding in his principles, taking abuse from the guards without complaint.

In November 1933, Fritz Bauer was transferred from Heuberg to a newly founded prison, Oberer Kuhberg concentration camp, located in former Army barracks in Ulm, where the guards were professional policemen instead of the SA, and conditions were better.

On 13 November 1933, a letter appeared in the Ulmer Tagblatt newspaper from eight imprisoned Social Democrats declaring their loyalty to the new regime, which led to their release; one of the signatories was Fritz Bauer, who felt so humiliated that he never allowed discussion of this chapter of his life.

Schumacher was offered release if he signed such a declaration, which he refused, saying that he rather would stay in the concentration camps forever than betray his beliefs; much of the praise that Fritz Bauer was later to offer Schumacher as a man who was always true to himself seemed to have reflected guilt about his own actions in signing the declaration.

Steincke not thinking the situation was so dire changed his mind after Fritz Bauer requested that his parents be given a visa to Greenland.

Fritz Bauer spent 8 days in hiding in a cellar and on the night of 13 October 1943 left Denmark in a Danish fishing boat that took him his parents, sister, brother in law and two nephews to Sweden.

Fritz 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.

In 1957, thanks to Lothar Hermann, a former Nazi camps prisoner, Fritz Bauer relayed information about the whereabouts in Argentina of fugitive Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann to Israeli Intelligence, the Mossad.

In 1957, Fritz Bauer passed the information to Mossad director Isser Harel, who assigned operatives to undertake surveillance, but no concrete evidence was initially found.

Fritz Bauer trusted neither Germany's police nor the country's legal system, as he feared that if he had informed them, they would likely have tipped off Eichmann.

Fritz Bauer's sources remained secret, and along with Klammer's recomposed picture were not revealed before 2021.

Mossad's Isser Harel acknowledged the important role Fritz Bauer played in Eichmann's capture, and claimed that he pressed insistently for the Israeli authorities to organize an operation to apprehend and deport him to Israel.

Fritz Bauer was active in the postwar efforts to obtain justice and compensation for victims of the Nazi regime.

In 1968, working with German journalist Gerhard Szczesny, Fritz Bauer founded the Humanist Union, a human rights organization.

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.