Fritz Bauer

Fritz Bauer (16 July 1903 – 1 July 1968) was a German judge and prosecutor who played an essential role in starting the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials.

Bauer was born in Stuttgart, Kingdom of Württemberg, German Empire, to Jewish parents. He attended Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium and studied business and law at the Universities of Heidelberg, Munich and Tübingen.

After receiving his Doctorate of Laws degree (youngest Jur.Dr. ever in Germany), Bauer became an assessor judge in the Stuttgart local district court. By 1920, he had already joined the Social Democratic Party. In the early 1930s, Bauer was, together with Kurt Schumacher, one of the leaders of the local Reichsbanner chapter in Stuttgart. In May 1933, a plan to organize a General Strike in the Stuttgart region against the Nazis failed, and Schumacher and Bauer were arrested with others, and taken to Heuberg concentration camp. The much more prominent and older Schumacher (a crippled veteran of World War I), who had been a fierce and prominent opponent of the Nazis as SPD deputy in the Reichstag, remained in concentration camps (which completely destroyed his health) until the end of the war in May 1945, whereas the young and largely unknown Bauer was released, which probably spared him from becoming a victim of the Shoah. A short time later Bauer was dismissed from his civil service position.

In 1935, Bauer emigrated to Denmark and then to Sweden (1943) 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 Hessen, based in Frankfurt a. M. Bauer held this position until his death in 1968.

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