The Jewish lawyer who battled to bring the Nazis to justice

Telegraph

27-02-2025

Not all superheroes wear capes. Some, as Jack Fairweather's superb biography of the German prosecutor and judge Fritz Bauer shows, wear lawyer's robes instead. Bauer was instrumental in using the law in postwar West Germany to bring former Nazis to justice: and, like Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, he saw courtrooms not merely as legal arenas but also as mirrors to society's flaws, prejudices and fears.
'A small man with a mighty head, rumbling voice, and alarmingly provocative manner,' Bauer was a triple outsider in Weimar Germany: he was gay, Jewish and socialist. Cognisant of which way the Nazi winds were blowing once Adolf Hitler had taken power, he fled to Scandinavia in 1936 and did not return to what had by then become West Germany until 1949.
Drawing on unpublished family papers, newly declassified German records and exclusive interviews, Fairweather, a former head of this paper's Baghdad bureau and winner of the 2019 Costa Prize for his biography of Polish resistance fighter Witold Pilecki, cleverly frames Bauer's story around three trials.
The first, which Bauer observed from afar in Copenhagen, was the Nuremberg Trial (1945-6): vital but 'limited to a few Nazi leaders and [dismissing] the mass murder of Europe's Jews as a facet of the war.' By the time the trial was over and Bauer returned to Germany, many Nazis had slotted seamlessly back into society; re-entering the justice system in the Braunschweig courts, Bauer would even work alongside some of them. The Brockhaus Encyclopaedia's entry for Auschwitz, too, included 'an extended discussion about the town's industrial capacity and just a single line about the camp'. Here were a people who wished to forget; here was a man who would not let them do so.
Cue the second trial: that of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Having received word that the former SS man was living in Buenos Aires, but knowing any official West German extradition attempt would tip Eichmann off, Bauer instead took his information to Mossad. Such a thing was extraordinarily brave to do without authorisation, especially given that this was a foreign power's intelligence service.
Mossad demurred from following up the lead, first on the grounds of limited resources and then through fear of diplomatic fallout, but Bauer maintained the pressure by threatening the very scenario which had led him to seek them out in the first place – handing the case to his own government – and eventually Israeli agents kidnapped Eichmann and brought him back to Jerusalem for a trial which was followed around the world. When Hannah Arendt, who famously lambasted Eichmann 'the banality of evil', criticised the trial's theatrics, Bauer took issue. 'The spectacle was the point: trials needed to immerse people in the experience of the crime in order to generate an emotional response that resonated beyond the courtroom.'
But still Bauer was not satisfied. Eichmann's trial had brought the Holocaust into focus, but casting the SS man as its chief architect had implicitly absolved millions of 'ordinary' Germans. Mentally dividing those involved into three categories – the believers, the obedient, and the beneficiaries who'd 'howled with the wolves because it's convenient' – Bauer set about preparing the ground for the third trial, bringing 25 men to court in Frankfurt to demonstrate how their individual roles at Auschwitz had combined to forge a wider killing apparatus. The defendants included men who were now pillars of the community: a successful glass exporter, an obstetrician, a college lecturer and more.
For much of the trial, proceedings did not turn out the way Bauer had hoped: as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper put it, 'there is an upper limit to human comprehension beyond which compassion quickly turns into dullness and resignation.' As if to prove Bauer's belief in the power of emotion, however, everything changed when the trial officials visited Auschwitz itself. 'It is now clear,' wrote the journalist and Holocaust survivor Inge Deutschkron, '[that] these attorneys would have refused to defend the mass murderers if they understood the true meaning of the Auschwitz trial as they now perceive it.'
The Frankfurt trial was Bauer's greatest achievement, even if he was angry at the leniency of the verdicts: only seven of the defendants received life sentences, and five were released altogether. 'In revealing precisely how the genocide had taken place,' Fairweather writes, '[the trial] had shown the Holocaust to be a collective endeavour. Bauer had challenged Germans to recognise their own complicity, [and his] vision of a collective reckoning had helped to inspire a new generation of jurists, activists, journalists, writers and educators.'
None of this, however, brought Bauer happiness in his personal life. 'I live as if I were in exile,' he once said, not least regarding the pressures of being a gay man at a time when homosexuality was outlawed. When his friend, the writer and filmmaker Thomas Harlan, had rubbed tomato pulp on his back as a cure for sunburn while on holiday in Tunisia, Bauer said he had only been touched with such care twice before – by his nanny aged five, and by a Danish prison guard when he was arrested during the war at German request.
'I have not yet been able to learn tenderness towards people, including myself,' Bauer told Harlan. At his funeral, another friend described him as having died, aged 64, 'infinitely alone, infinitely depressed, infinitely sad.' But in these pages he still lives, emphatically and vibrantly so. This is a magnificent book about a magnificent man.
The Prosecutor is published by WH Allen at £22. To order your copy for £18.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books