Nazi Germany may have been utterly defeated by May 1945, yet support for the far right endured. As Jack Fairweather points out in his biography of German-Jewish lawyer Fritz Bauer, even in the 1950s “almost half the population thought things had been better under Hitler”. Antisemitism, too, remained endemic: a 1956 poll in West Germany found that a quarter of respondents believed the country would be better off without Jews.
For Bauer, the two phenomena were closely related: a direct consequence of Germany’s collective failure after the second world war to acknowledge the nature and extent of its complicity in Nazi atrocities. Bauer was part of a tiny but vocal minority of intellectuals, artists and lawyers intent on piercing the general resistance to an honest reckoning with the past in West Germany (the situation in the communist East was different). This began to gain traction only in the 1960s with support from a younger generation on the radical left.
Fairweather builds a compelling case that Bauer’s determination to bring former war criminals to justice played a leading part in this belated reckoning. He himself had been arrested and tortured by the Gestapo in 1933 and lost close family members in the Holocaust. He only narrowly survived by fleeing to Denmark in 1936, and once Denmark became a death trap, to Sweden.
Returning to Germany after the war, Bauer rebuilt his legal career — but was appalled by the indifference, complacency and widespread cover-ups he encountered. From then until his death in 1968, he was indefatigable in his efforts to use the law to expose and prosecute the full horror of Nazi genocide. “No crime committed during wartime should be more serious than this mass extermination,” he wrote as early as 1944, “as it is evidence of the most cynical contempt for life.”
Appointed attorney-general of Braunschweig in 1950 and of the state of Hesse in 1956, Bauer set about his investigations into former war criminals with vigour. He immediately met with entrenched opposition, not least from West Germany’s chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Despite having suffered himself under the Nazis, Adenauer was a committed Christian who believed in forgiveness and supported calls for a general amnesty for war crimes.
His well-intentioned but catastrophic decision in 1949 to “let bygones be bygones”, in his now infamous phrase, assisted European co-operation and West German reconstruction, but also ended the shortlived denazification program and enabled hundreds of judges, lawyers, politicians and civil servants to conceal their own active participation in Nazi-era atrocities. The CIA, meanwhile, was employing former SS officers and others to fillet information for its espionage campaign against the Soviet Union.
Fairweather tells this story with impressive clarity and pace, drawing on unpublished family papers and recently declassified German records to depict both a sensitive portrait of a heroically courageous individual and a compulsively readable account of the febrile cold war context in which German, US and Soviet interests were darkly enmeshed.
Bauer’s tireless efforts and years of dogged investigations would lead to the arrests of numerous notorious criminals such as Richard Baer, the last commandant of Auschwitz, and Adolf Eichmann. Indeed, it was Bauer, not Simon Wiesenthal, who was primarily responsible for tracking down Eichmann in Argentina and ensuring his abduction and eventual trial in Israel in 1961.
He had less success with Hans Globke, Adenauer’s top civil servant and right-hand man. A senior civil servant under Hitler, Globke had shaped the legal rationale and guidelines for implementing antisemitic racial laws, including the introduction of the J stamp in Jewish passports, and was directly implicated in the murder of 20,000 Greek Jews. In 1961, Adenauer’s agent met personally with Israeli prime minister Ben-Gurion to offer a monetary incentive to keep Globke’s name out of the Eichmann trial.
Bauer’s mission, however, went beyond prosecuting the men at the top. His goal was to put Auschwitz itself on trial, in order to change the legal definition of murder, which under the German criminal code meant perpetrators could only be convicted for individual murders and where intent to kill was established. Bauer, by contrast, wanted to prove, as he put it, that “Everyone who worked within this killing machine, regardless of what they did, was guilty of complicity in murder . . . from the guards up to the highest levels.”
At huge personal cost and despite constant death threats, phone-tapping, and public smear campaigns, he persisted in this goal through years of gruelling and dogged investigations. The Auschwitz trial, which opened in December 1963 and ran for 16 months, was what finally cut through. The biggest trial in modern German history, it was covered by the world’s press. The raw power of 360 witness testimonies succeeded in changing forever the world’s understanding not only of the true horror of the Nazi regime, but that those horrors were a “collective endeavour” and the profound moral questions that posed. With liberal democracies once more imperilled and indifference to the Holocaust stupefyingly widespread, The Prosecutor could hardly be more timely.
The Prosecutor: One Man’s Battle to Bring Nazis to Justice by Jack Fairweather, WH Allen £22, 496 pages
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