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. Stuttgart, a city located in southern Germany, is the capital of the state of Baden-Württemberg with a population of approximately 600,000 as of June 2004. ... Frankfurt am Main [ˈfraŋkfʊrt] is the largest city in the German state of Hessen and the fifth largest city of Germany. ...

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. Map of Germany showing Heidelberg Heidelberg (halfway between Stuttgart and Frankfurt) is a city in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. ... Munich: Frauenkirche and Town Hall steeple Munich (German: München (pronounced listen) is the state capital of the German state of Bavaria. ... Tübingen, Neckar front Tübingen, an old university city of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, is situated 20 miles southwest of Stuttgart, on a ridge between the River Neckar and the Ammer. ... The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD – Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) is the oldest political party of Germany still in existence and also one of the oldest and largest in the world, celebrating its 140th anniversary in 2003. ... The Gestapo was the official secret police force of Nazi Germany. ...

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. Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 18 km (over 11 miles) into the air, August 9, 1945 after the Allied atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ... Willy Brandt (December 18, 1913 – October 8, 1992) was a German politician and Chancellor of Germany from 1969 to 1974. ... The Federal Republic of Germany can refer to two things: West Germany from 1949-1990 Germany since German reunification in 1990 ... Map of Germany showing Braunschweig Braunschweig [ˈbraunʃvaik] is a city of 245,500 people (as of December 31, 2004), located in Lower Saxony, Germany. ... With an area of 21,110 km² and just over six million inhabitants, Hesse (German: Hessen) is one of Germanys sixteen federal states (Bundesländer). ...

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. On Novembe 24, 1947, Polish authorities tried forty-one former members of staff from the Auschwitz concentration camps in a Krakow courtroom. ...

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