Fritz Bauer Institut

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 to Jewish parents. He attended Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium and studied business and law at the Universities of Heidelberg, Munich and Tübingen.

In 1928, after receiving his doctor of laws degree (at 25, the youngest 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, which probably spared him from becoming a victim of Nazi genocide. A short time later Bauer, like most Jews, was dismissed from his civil service position.

In 1935, Bauer emigrated to Denmark, then in 1943 to Sweden after the Danish government resigned and the Nazis declared martial law which endangered the Jewish population in Denmark. 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 a. M. Bauer held this position until his death in 1968.

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