Fritz Bauer’s death came as a surprise in July 1968. The Attorney General had just postponed his retirement. He wanted to remain in office until the age of 68. Bauer did not feel at the end of his tether, however much he was affected by the hostility and the political trend to the right and the insinuations made against him. He suffered “because he knew that this hatred was really directed at the other, the better Germany”, wrote the Sonntagsblatt on 9 July 1968, while the newspaper Die Tat wrote that for all those who want to turn back the wheel of history, “he was the most hated man in the Federal Republic”. Many had high hopes for him, especially the younger generation. Yet he remained a persecuted man who lacked active support.

But Fritz Bauer was also “a fighter without fear or reproach”: “It did not bother him that his humane attitude was misunderstood by many to the end, not only by the diehards.” At least that’s what the Neue Presse reported on 2 July 1968.

The Hessian Minister of Justice Strelitz (SPD) announced on 3 July that a forensic medical examination had revealed: “Heart failure due to acute bronchitis (…). Third-party culpability was ruled out with absolute certainty.”(Frankfurter Rundschau, 4 July 1968) More recent investigations by Brandenburg’s Attorney General Prof. Dr Erardo Rautenberg (see Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, December 2015) have shown, however, that neither suicide nor outside influence can be completely ruled out.

With Bauer’s death, the prisoners and the resistance fighters and survivors of the Nazi regime lost their advocate, a decisive, if not the decisive voice. Chaplain Joseph C. Roissant, himself a survivor of Nazi rule and co-founder of the Association of Persecutees of National Socialism, declared with dismay that Bauer’s “solidarity with all former opponents of Hitler and victims” ensured him their love and constant remembrance and a deep sense of gratitude.

There was no one to replace Bauer in the judiciary and take his place. This was another reason why the jurist was soon forgotten after his death. A first, brief news item appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau on 2 July 1968:

“Fritz Bauer is dead: there are no words. Books could be written about the Hessian Attorney General, biographers will do the same. But this news is paralysing: Fritz Bauer is dead. And it’s hard to flee into uncommitments. All the words seem stale and empty: painful loss, irreplaceable, unforgotten … This man, overflowing with temperament – one resists it, wants to suppress the news of his death.
But not everyone loved him. Fritz Bauer was far too honest for that. He didn’t just have friends. He was far too uncomfortable for that. When it came to the law. Or rather, what he understood it to mean. That was something different from what we were used to. And so he paid for his right-mindedness with many personal sacrifices. No, he was not loved by the eternally old-fashioned, they were too focussed on the future. And too much into the past: that was perhaps even more unpleasant for them. But in this hour it is a consolation to know that Fritz Bauer had almost only friends in the younger generation…”

Bauer’s outsider position became clear in the commemorative articles. Some did not mince their words, articulating self-doubt regarding their commitment to the jurist and his cause. At the official funeral service, Dr Robert M. W. Kempner, prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial and also a persecuted member of the National Socialist regime, found apt words. He called Bauer prophetic, recalling that he had written a book about war crimes in exile in Sweden, which was used in Nuremberg.

“Tens of thousands of persecuted people in the USA, in Australia, in Canada, in South America, in Israel and in many other countries around the world mourn Fritz Bauer,” said Kempner, citing the reasons for Bauer’s sometimes palpable resignation: “the ever-increasing inadequacy of the relatively lenient punishment of mass perpetrators in murder cases on the one hand and the severe punishment of individual perpetrators in murder cases on the other. That was something that depressed him, perhaps not emotionally, but professionally.” “Did we actually ‘take care’ of Fritz Bauer enough?” he asked himself, and Klempner’s answer was clear: “We certainly could and should have done much, much more for him, and I personally regret today that people who were united against him – and I say this quite openly – were not punched in the face left and right by such vile political character assassins.”

For Robert M. W. Kempner, Dr Bauer was the spokesman for the murdered, who was too modest to know that his banner was still standing. “He was,” said the Nuremberg prosecutor, “the greatest ambassador the Federal Republic of Germany ever had!”

At the official funeral service, the local branch of the Humanist Union, which Bauer had co-founded, paid tribute to the difficult path that the Attorney General had travelled in life and that he had never failed “when it was necessary to personally intervene with advice and help in difficult hours and difficult situations”. He was not a harsh and relentless prosecutor, on the contrary: “in the profession of public prosecutor, in the whole world, humanists in the most beautiful sense of the word, as Fritz Bauer was, can only be found in very rare exceptional cases”.

After Bauer’s death, the Humanist Union founded the “Fritz Bauer Prize”, while his own party, the SPD, forgot about him for many years. He was probably too combative and passionate for the party leaders, too little of a political tactician and diplomat on his own behalf. It was not until 2014 that Federal Minister of Justice Heiko Maas (SPD) broke with this tradition and endowed the “Fritz Bauer Study Prize for Human Rights and Contemporary Legal History” with the words:

“Fritz Bauer stood up for democracy when far too few lawyers in Germany did. He brought the injustice of the Nazis to justice against great resistance in the judiciary. And he was always committed to modern and humane criminal law. Fritz Bauer saw his profession as a judge and public prosecutor as an obligation to stand up for democracy and human rights. During his lifetime, he was persecuted, hated and controversial; today, Fritz Bauer is a role model for all lawyers. That is why I have endowed this prize.”

Attorney General Mützelburg, Fritz Bauer’s successor in this office in Braunschweig and the longest-serving attorney general in his succession, also recalled Dr Bauer’s service to his fellow human beings in 1968. He saw this expressed above all in the fact that Bauer tried to investigate the causes of the crimes, whereby his heart always beat for everything human, including human weaknesses and mistakes. Despite bitter experiences and disappointments, Dr Bauer struggled to “recognise the good in people, to awaken and preserve it”. “No one,” said Attorney General Mützelburg, “could have felt more like the father of the prisoners to whom his advocacy for a modern penal system was ultimately directed.”

The association “Zuflucht, gemeinnützige Bürgerhilfe e.V.” also saw it this way, publishing anadvertisement in the Süddeutsche Zeitungon 3 July 1968 to commemorate the “irreplaceable friend” who had headed the association’s Frankfurt working group and was chairman of the legal advisory board. Among the signatories for the association, which provides assistance to released prisoners, were lawyer Till Burger, Senator Dr Karl Baer, Brigitta Wolf, Dietrich Bahner, Wolfgang Lohmüller, Waldemar v. Knoeringen (Member of the State Parliament) and Dr Josef Müller (former State Minister) – a politically mixed company.

In a short news item on page 2, the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung paid tribute to Fritz Bauer and alluded to the fact that he had once addressed prisoners in a penal institution as “comrades”. The lawyer was deeply convinced that society was responsible for the criminal offences of its members, “that the personal, moral guilt of an offender should take a back seat.” With his criminology-influenced view of a new criminal law, Bauer was one of the mavericks. “His honesty and tolerance, his courage to find his own way, was recognised by everyone, even those who did not follow his ideas.”

Karl Heinz-Krumm (1930-1992), who had survived five years in a prison camp in the Soviet Union and found a job at the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper after his release in 1955, also emphasised Dr Bauer’s humane commitment in his memorial article on 3 July 1968. Dr Bauer was a political man, but he knew no taboos, wrote Krumm. Bauer’s motto was that it was not enough to proclaim wisdom, it also had to be acted upon. And that’s what the General Public Prosecutor did: “It happened that former prisoners, suddenly in dire straits, called him at home late at night and asked for advice. Bauer never turned anyone away. Human dignity was something sacrosanct for him.”

According to Krumm, the lawyer was the last hope for many. Bauer’s life and work could not be dealt with by cheap rhetoric and solemn obituary routines, “but required a commitment to his almost religious humanity, his view of guilt and punishment, of law and society.” In his best-known works, “Crime and Society” and “In Search of Justice”, Fritz Bauer set out his view of justice comprehensively and convincingly. The journalist emphasised two sentences in particular: “Lawyers and laypeople must learn scepticism, they like and must bear in mind the risk that lies in every judgement.” Or: “Justice and law only become true and real when love, of which grace is a part, is united with the law. Love does not stand outside the state, not on its periphery. It is ultimately its centre.”

In Fritz Bauer’s case, it should not be said, as is usually the case, that he had rendered outstanding services to his country, but rather: “He had rendered outstanding services to mankind.”

The lawyer and Frankfurt professor Ilse Staff wrote an obituary for the magazine Tribüne (H. 27, 1968) that expressed the tragedy of Bauer’s search for justice. He encountered a society that demanded adaptation (resocialisation), but had yet to prove itself worthy of adaptation: “He was the attorney general who indicted the murderers of Auschwitz. He received little thanks in Germany.” The fact that he was not honoured did not harm Bauer. It was the malice with which some of his opponents and critics accused him of inconsistency and dishonest motives that got to him. Ilse Staff expressed this in her obituary as bluntly as it was:

“There the defendants stood before German judges – oh yes, they gave all respect to the representatives of the third power in the Federal Republic: they bowed to the authorities, as they had always done, military in demeanour and speech. The witnesses, the former prisoners of Auschwitz, stammered, sobbed, struggled to testify – their oppressor did not. They stood before a new authority and did what it demanded of them. Criminals who should no longer be dangerous, from whom humanity does not need to be protected?

Anyone who experienced Fritz Bauer during the Auschwitz trial knows how much he suffered and how desperate he was. There he sat – strangely small, slumped over, wide awake, his very kind, intelligent eyes filled with sorrow for humanity, in which inhumanity had become a stark reality. But Auschwitz was and is not over. And that is the agonising thing, the thing that cannot be overcome: For Fritz Bauer, a new Auschwitz began with the Auschwitz trial. The anonymous phone calls, the anonymous letters that came daily until his death. He was called a ‘Jewish pig’, he was threatened, ostracised, humiliated. That was when the insomnia, the depression, the immense loneliness of Fritz Bauer, who was so kind, so loving, so devoted to people, began. His book ‘In Search of Justice’ concludes with the sentences: ‘Rationality and humanity unite. Perhaps this is why one of the most beautiful sentences about justice and law is what Aristotle said in his Nicomachean Ethics: ‘The principle that corresponds most completely to true justice has to do with the nature of friendship. In the same ‘Ethics’, he himself described friendship as the ‘most necessary thing in life’.
Like all of us, however much we loved him, we did not give him enough friendship, warmth and help. Perhaps there were few who knew how lonely, how desperate he was in the last period of his life. But we knew, and we did not help him. In one of his last publications, ‘Schopenhauer und die Strafrechtsproblematik’ (Schopenhauer and the problem of criminal law), it says: ‘The politically active person holds on to the principle of hope, even if he cannot sometimes self-critically avoid the feeling that it could be a life lie. What kind of world do we live in in which a man who loved beauty, warmth and brightness, who above all loved people so much, had to write this sentence full of bitterness and doubt?”

The writer Horst Krüger, who had been invited by Fritz Bauer to attend the Auschwitz trial, was faced with similar questions. He wrote in his memorial page for Bauer in the ZEIT on 12 July 1968:

“I imagine his end; a residue of mystery remains. The classic end of a bachelor in our modern industrialised society. The official car from the public prosecutor’s office that was supposed to pick him up drove back empty on Monday morning. They waited at the court, became restless, suspicious and finally broke into the flat at midday. They found him in the bathroom, in the water, dead. When? The doctor reconstructed that death must have occurred on Sunday morning. It was one of those sultry, subtropically hot days in early summer that cause such sudden circulatory deaths. After the post-mortem, the doctor diagnosed heart failure due to acute bronchitis. So that was it: all the smoking, the hot bath… That alone? Since his return from his Scandinavian emigration, Fritz Bauer had only lived for our democracy, for a little more freedom in our society. He died alone, in his flat. Some will breathe a sigh of relief at this news, but some loved him. He was an emigrant at home: a stranger in the city.”

For some, Fritz Bauer remained this stranger. For decades, those responsible shied away from publishing his collected works, to which the institute named after Bauer in Frankfurt am Main secured the rights. Instead, the institute poked around in his private life. Fritz Bauer is by no means supposed to have been a hero, the Institute emphatically denies this.

But there were and still are signs of change.

Dr Heinz Meyer-Velde, for whom Fritz Bauer was a friend and “spiritual father” for many years, also thought so with a certain bitterness. In a letter to Dr Bauer’s sister Margot Tiefenthal in November 1969, the lawyer and ministry official, who worked as a prison warden, wrote: “Now they are beginning to honour Fritz Bauer – and all the people who fought against him during his lifetime and all too often made his life hell with vulgarities.” In addition to the Humanist Union Prize, he named the house for released prisoners in Bad Homburg, which was named after Bauer, and a juvenile detention centre in Darmstadt, which was given the name “Fritz Bauer House”. He wrote to Bauer’s sister that a relief portrait based on Bauer’s death mask by the artist Gotthelf Schlotter would be placed at the entrance.

Like Robert M. W. Kempner and Ilse Staff, Dr Meyer-Velde added that Fritz Bauer “would have benefited from a little more affection and help, indeed just a little more tolerance in life.” Only when an upright man “who disturbs people in their lethargy, in the sluggishness of their hearts, is dead, when he can no longer challenge them (…) only then do they honour him.”

What he wrote about Heinz Meyer-Velde in the foreword to his volume of poetry Wie gekenterte Schiffe (Verlag Neue Rabenpresse 1968) applied to Bauer himself: “For the author,” said Bauer, “Matthew’s vision of the Last Judgement may one day apply, in which it says: ‘The King will say: Come, you are blessed, for I have been imprisoned and you have come to me’.”