He Fled the Nazis Before the War. He Came Back to Put His Country on Trial.

New York Times

22-02-2025

On a gray wintry day in December 1970, Willy Brandt, the first postwar Social Democratic chancellor of West Germany, fell to his knees at a Warsaw monument to the Jews who had fought there against the Nazis. His gesture has come to exemplify what the Germans resonantly call Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the striving to cope with the past. For all the shortcomings in this nationwide effort, most Germans today set an example of remorse that shames Turkish nationalist leaders equivocating about the Armenian genocide, or rightist Japanese politicians visiting the Yasukuni war shrine in Tokyo that honors Class A war criminals.
Yet in the years after World War II, many Germans were in varying degrees unrepentant, nationalistic or self-justifying. Four years after the Allied military tribunal at Nuremberg for top Nazi leaders, only 38 percent of West Germans in the American-occupied zone approved of further trials for war criminals.
How did so many Germans become contrite about the Nazi past? In his gripping and well-researched biography, 'The Prosecutor,' Jack Fairweather argues that the answer lies in part in the work of an irascible, honorable German Jewish lawyer named Fritz Bauer, who pressed the people of his country 'to face their complicity in the industrialized mass murder of Europe's Jews.'
A bookish judge in Stuttgart under the Weimar Republic, Bauer was triply anathematized in Nazi Germany: He was Jewish, a Social Democratic foe of Nazism and a secretly gay man. He and his fellow Social Democrats were shaken by the readiness of establishment conservatives who 'went along with Hitler's desire to upend the democratic order.' Bauer was lucky to survive six terrifying months in the concentration camps, where he was repeatedly beaten. He emerged to find a police state where Jewish doctors could not practice and Jewish stores were boycotted, while Stuttgart's non-Jewish residents unconcernedly got on with their lives. As Christmas drew near, Fairweather writes, 'girls from the newly renamed Adolf Hitler School sang carols.' Bauer fled to Denmark in 1936 and then to Sweden in 1943, after a Danish rabbi warned that the occupying Germans were about to round up all the Jews in the country.
Fairweather's book makes for an uncomfortable reminder of how many Germans supported the Third Reich. The legal ideal of individual criminal justice crumbled before the more than 250,000 Germans who had served in the SS, murdering at Auschwitz and the other death camps in German-controlled Poland, or as part of the mobile killing squads called the Einsatzgruppen; the indoctrinated soldiers of the German military who had backed up the Einsatzgruppen's massacres, shot Jews themselves or used Jews as slave labor, as well as killing vast numbers of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians; the bureaucrats and lawyers who had arranged the logistics of genocide; and the nearly 14 million Germans who had voted for the Nazis in July 1932, although Hitler's vicious hatred of Jews had been flaunted in 'Mein Kampf' and his fulminating speeches.
Returning to Allied-occupied Germany in 1948, Bauer demanded at least a symbolic German reckoning with that widespread complicity. While some skeptics dismiss war crimes trials as a veiled tool of Western domination, Fairweather shows a quite different dynamic. In the early Cold War, the Western powers increasingly preferred to shelve war crimes prosecutions in order to fortify West Germany as an anti-Soviet bulwark. Far from justice being a foreign imposition, here German prosecutors pursued German trials for German crimes.
In 1956, Bauer became the attorney general of West Germany's largest state and issued an arrest warrant for Adolf Eichmann, the fervid SS chieftain who had engineered the deportation of Jews from across Europe to the death camps. With good reason, Bauer worried that Nazis working in West Germany's government might alert Eichmann or scupper the investigation. The first head of West Germany's new foreign intelligence agency was Reinhard Gehlen, previously the Third Reich's chief of military intelligence for the eastern front in World War II. He knew where Eichmann had gone to ground in Argentina, but did not inform Bauer, instead putting the German prosecutor under surveillance.
When Bauer unexpectedly got a tip from a Dachau survivor with Eichmann's address in Argentina, he did not dare ask the West German police to run it down. Instead he passed his information to the Israelis and kept exhorting them to grab Eichmann — leading eventually to his abduction from Buenos Aires and his dramatic 1961 trial in an Israeli court in Jerusalem.
As the German journalist Ronen Steinke argues in his own first-rate biography, Bauer's greatest achievement was a sprawling trial of some 20 German officers and functionaries at Auschwitz, held in a Frankfurt courtroom in the mid-60s. Bauer made a point of prosecuting not just senior camp leaders but also lower-ranked Germans, since every person operating the death camp contributed to mass murder. The most devastating testimony came from Auschwitz survivors, one of whom described the mortal terror of people in the gas chambers, some taking 10 or more minutes to die, struggling frantically, their corpses covered in blood from their noses and ears. An Austrian Jewish survivor recalled the words of a little boy who was to be gassed the next day: 'No, I'm not afraid. It's all so terrible here, it can only be better up there.'
Fairweather writes that Bauer's story shows 'how the Holocaust came to define our collective sense of humanity.' Yet his book arrives as major political parties are working to stamp the memory of the Holocaust out of public consciousness. Last year, the immigrant-hating extremist party Alternative for Germany became the first far-right group to win a plurality in a state election since the fall of Nazi Germany. The party was led to victory by Björn Höcke, who has scorned the prominent Holocaust memorial in Berlin and said that Germany needs a '180-degree' turn in remembering its history.
In 2023, the billionaire mogul Elon Musk endorsed as 'the actual truth' an antisemitic online post that blamed Jewish communities for pushing 'dialectical hatred against whites' and flooding Western countries with 'hordes of minorities'; earlier this year, he took time out from his new role as a powerful adviser to President Trump to tell an AfD rally by video that Germany has 'too much of a focus on past guilt.' Trump won his second term as president despite having dinner at his Florida estate with Kanye West, an outspoken antisemite, and Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier. Fairweather's book would be haunting to read at any time; it is especially bitter today.