When Fritz Bauer came back to Germany from exile at the end of World War II, he soon found that he was still surrounded by Nazis. Denazification was mostly a failure (for a variety of reasons) and law enforcement, the judiciary, and so many businesses were staffed with an alarming number of former Nazis. But unlike a lot of other Germans, Bauer was able to get into a position to do something about it. He parlayed his pre-war degree and experience into a job as director of the district courts in Braunschweig (like a district attorney for the Americans reading this) and later Frankfurt am Main. In The Prosecutor: One Man’s Battle of Bring Nazis to Justice, Jack Fairweather recounts Bauer’s decades-long fight not just against Nazis but also the refusal of a lot of Germans to reckon with their recent past.
The early chapters of The Prosecutor are a galloping biography of Bauer, a gay, Jewish man who tried to climb the judicial ladder but was stymied by the anti-semitic policies of the Nazis. He was able to escape to Denmark with most of his family after he was briefly imprisoned. When he came back, however, the anti-semitism and homophobia were still there—as were many known Nazis. Fairweather does excellent work setting the post-war political stage by highlighting the reliance of the first West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, on former Nazis like Hans Globke and Reinhard Gehlen. Globke played an important part in the drafting of the Nuremberg Race Laws. Gehlen, who went on to build and run West Germany’s intelligence service, used his experience running intelligence against the Soviets during the war into jobs with the Americans and the West Germans. Neither Globke nor Gehlen faced any legal prosecution or punishment for their actions before and during World War II. Fairweather notes that Gehlen went to extraordinary lengths to conceal his and Globke’s past from discovery.
The middle section of The Prosecutor builds towards the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials (1963-1968) and the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1961-1962) in Jerusalem. Because of his position, Bauer wasn’t able to directly prosecute cases in West Germany, though he was able to select cases for prosecution and locate evidence. He coordinated with the prosecutors who would actually appear in court, helped to convince witnesses to speak, and appeared in numerous press conferences to get people interested not just in these new trials but also the atrocities so many Germans were unwilling to talk about even fifteen years or more after the end of the war. In the case of Adolf Eichmann, Bauer played an important role in locating that monster in Argentina.
The chapters discussing the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial were electric. Fairweather puts us right in the courtroom with details about how witnesses—especially Holocaust survivors—were treated. Some of the defendants and court spectators would laugh at, mock, and threaten witnesses. Things got so bad that Dietrich Bonhoeffer‘s sister-in-law, Emmi Bonhoeffer, took it upon herself to arrange escorts for witnesses so that they wouldn’t be harassed. (Fairweather shares the appalling fact that witnesses and defendants were sometimes housed in the same hotel during the trials.) The turning point seems to come when members of the court and some of the defendants go to Auschwitz. Once in Auschwitz, it was impossible for anyone to ignore the testimony of the witnesses and the sheer scale of the genocide partially carried out there. I have read a lot of books about the Holocaust but few details have hit me as hard as the one Fairweather includes about one of the court’s guides dipping his hand into a ditch to retrieve a handful of human ash and mud.
For all the work Bauer, his prosecutors, and others helping to bring former Nazis to trial did, Bauer spent a lot of time fretting that it wasn’t enough to break through the deliberate silence maintained by Germans who lived through the war and the Nazi regime. He thought that many of the shockingly light sentences handed out at the end of the trial were insults to survivors and victims of the Holocaust. Bauer passed away in 1968, before he could see how Germans born after the war would engage in Vergangenheitsbewältigung (from Wikipedia, “‘struggle of overcoming the past’ or ‘work of coping with the past'”), with more honest teaching of history, monuments, literature, art, and so on. Fairweather also notes that Bauer’s work created legal precedent in Germany that was used to prosecute other former Nazis and Holocaust perpetrators like John Demjanjuk, who went to trial in Germany in 2009.
The Prosecutor is not an easy book to read. Fairweather is unflinching about sharing testimony that emphasizes the depraved brutality of the Holocaust. But I very much appreciated learning about Fritz Bauer, who had the bravery and determination to bring former war criminals into a courtroom to account for their actions during the Holocaust. He faced down countless death threats, threats to his job, and deliberate bureaucratic inertia and obstruction to try and deliver justice. We need more people like Bauer in this world to push us towards our own Vergangenheitsbewältigung.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.