Fritz Bauer

In 1968, working with German journalist Gerhard Szczesny, Bauer founded the Humanist Union, a human-rights organization. After Bauer's death, the Union donated money to endow the Fritz Bauer Prize. Another organization, the Fritz Bauer Institute, founded in 1995, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to civil rights that focuses on history and the effects of the Holocaust.

In 1957, Bauer relayed information about the whereabouts in Argentina of fugitive Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann to Israeli Intelligence, the Mossad, that allowed Eichmann to be captured. Bauer thus was instrumental in bringing him to trial in Israel in 1960. Bauer also was active in the 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 Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, which opened in 1963.

In 1935, Bauer emigrated to Denmark. After the German occupation, the Danish authorities revoked his residence permit in April 1940 and interned him in a camp for three months. In October 1943, he fled to Sweden after the Danish government resigned and the Nazis declared martial law, which endangered the Jewish population in Denmark. The fact that Bauer was a homosexual – something he was careful to keep to himself – placed him in even further peril should he remain in Germany or in Nazi-occupied Denmark. To protect himself, he formally married the Danish kindergarten teacher Anna Maria Petersen, in June 1943. 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 (West Germany) was being established, and once more entered the civil service in the justice system. At first he became director of the district courts, and later the equivalent of a U.S. district attorney, in Braunschweig. In 1956, he was appointed the district attorney in Hessen, based in Frankfurt. Bauer held this position until his death in 1968.

In 1928, after receiving his PhD in law (at 25, Doktor der Rechte [Jur.Dr.] in Germany), Bauer became an assessor judge in the Stuttgart local district court. By 1920, he already had joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD). In the early 1930s, Bauer was, together with Kurt Schumacher, one of the leaders of the SPD's Reichsbanner defense league in Stuttgart. In May 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 Bauer were arrested with others and taken to Heuberg concentration camp. The more prominent and older Schumacher, who had been an outspoken opponent of the Nazis as an SPD deputy in the Reichstag, remained in concentration camps (which destroyed his health) until the end of World War II, whereas the young and largely unknown Bauer was released. A short time later Bauer, like most Jews, was dismissed from his civil service position.

Fritz Bauer was born on July 16, 1903 in Stuttgart, Germany.