“I am abandoned by God and the world,” Fritz Bauer wrote to Thomas Harlan. It’s a strange correspondence between the Hessian Attorney General and the 26-year younger theater and filmmakers. Bauer comes from a Jewish family and is considered implacable Nazi hunter. Harlan is the son of Goebbels antisemitic Hetzfilmer Veit Harlan, he tried on his own to bring Nazi leaders in court.
In the movie “The Act General” depicts the first on Wednesday (20:15) life and work of the man who was in the 50s and 60s as the most hated lawyer in Germany, because he was “the thorn in the system still deep brown judiciary” ( “Süddeutsche Zeitung”). Bauer, in the ARD film brilliantly played by Ulrich Noethen, was the chief prosecutor of the first Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. And he provided for the seizure of the SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible for the murder of six million people.
“The State against Fritz Bauer” is available here on DVD 
Even more movies
Already 2014 and 2015 was Fritz Bauer lives in the movies portrayed “in the labyrinth of silence” and “the state against Fritz Bauer”. But who was he really?
He was born in 1903 in Stuttgart and studied in Heidelberg, Munich and Tübingen Jura. After his doctorate in law. he worked from 1928 as Gerichtsassessor the Amtsgericht Stuttgart. Bauer already occurred in 1920 at the SPD and known in spite of his Jewish parents’ house as an atheist.
In 1936 he emigrated to Denmark, which was occupied by German troops in 1940. Bauer came for three months in a warehouse and was 1943, when the Germans began the deportation of Danish Jews escape to neutral Sweden, where he worked as an assistant and Archives et al with Willy Brandt, the magazine “Socialist Tribune” founded.
return to Germany
1949 returned Fritz Bauer to Germany. He was initially Landgerichtsdirektor the Landgericht Braunschweig and 1950 Public Prosecutor at the Court of Appeal. In 1956 he was appointed to the office of Hessian Attorney General, based in Frankfurt.
Bauer had argued from the outset stubbornly for the seizure of Nazi murderers and the rehabilitation of resistance fighters. From it coined the phrase, “A state of injustice, committing tens of thousands murders daily, entitled anyone to self-defense.”
His passionate commitment made him on numerous colleagues – then most lawyers had previously served the Nazis – the hated Figure. “In justice as I live in exile,” he reportedly said. And: “If I my (service) leaving room, I enter enemy abroad.” There was vituperation, numerous intrigues, and even arson attacks and anonymous death threats against him. Nevertheless Fritz Bauer did not give up.
cooperation with the Mossad
In 1957 he received from a former concentration camp inmate pointing out that Adolf Eichmann was fleeing to Argentina succeeded and he in Buenos Aires live. Bauer’s request, the German government may seek his extradition to Germany, was rejected by Bonn. For this purpose one must know that the then Chancellery Minister Hans Maria Globke was a man who “had on most repulsive comments on the Nuremberg Race Laws” in 1935 ( “Süddeutsche Zeitung”).
In this state apparatus Bauer had little confidence. He saw the danger that former Nazis who had made wide in industry, administration and the Adenauer government, could warn Eichmann. Therefore, the German Attorney General worked with the Mossad. So he broke the law, so that right be done.
1960 Eichmann was kidnapped by Israeli agents and brought to Israel. At the trial in the District Court of Jerusalem, he was sentenced to death and hanged in 1962.
What would actually happen if Eichmann had actually been delivered to the Federal Republic? In the film, Bauer says the oppressive sentence: “In a process in Germany he might get acquitted.”
On 1 July 1968 Fritz Bauer was at the age of 64 years dead in the bathtub of his apartment in Frankfurt found. We found a Herzvorschädigung and severe acute bronchitis and taking a sleeping pill at the passionate smokers. A physician came from suicide, for this thesis there were in Bauer’s immediate vicinity no evidence. The statement of a judicial autopsy disobeyed the Frankfurt prosecutor’s office – and gave the corpse to the cremation dates
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