Autor/Autorin
„Anonymous against Fritz Bauer“ and „Leaflet triggers schadenfreude“ were the headlines in the Schwäbisches Tagblatt on 12 April 2017 under the heading „By the way“. This story is indeed superfluous, but not surprising.
The wind that set off the renewed storm was sown by the Frankfurt Fritz Bauer Institute, which published a criticism by Higher Regional Court judge Georg D. Falk in its magazine „Einsicht“ in 2015, forgetting the historical context, that Fritz Bauer had been involved in the dismissal of a case against a Nazi judge and Nazi prosecutor in 1964 and had dismissed investigations against Nazi lawyers in more than a hundred cases. SPIEGEL and Mannheimer Morgen reported on this, and others followed suit.
Kurt Nelhiebel has said all the necessary things about this under the heading „No reason to sneer“: http://www.kurt-nelhiebel.de/index.php/portraets/fritz-bauer.
The Fritz Bauer Institute is now again emphasising that critic Falk „is a great admirer“ of the institute’s namesake. But that’s the way it is, once the news, or rather the rumour, is out in the world, it sets off on its journey. In the current case, to Tübingen, where after the renaming of Adolf-Scheef-Straße as Fritz-Bauer-Straße on 27 March 2017, the local citizens‘ initiative, which fought against the renaming for three years, expressed its glee in an appropriately blatant manner. Last week, an anonymous leaflet writer distributed an abridged version of OLG judge Falk’s criticism of Bauer’s legal actions in local letterboxes. This was grist to the mill of the opponents of the street renaming, as Bauer had made common cause with Nazi judges. Finally, a blemish can be found on the honoured man. Because the accusations, writes Ulla Steuernagel in the Schwäbisches Tagblatt , have only one aim: „They are intended to discredit Bauer“.
The same applies to the rumours circulated by the Bauer Institute about the man who gave the institute its name: Fritz Bauer was a gay Jewish Nazi hunter who is said to have betrayed his party, the SPD, in 1933 and his Jewish origins after 1945.
The Institute’s retired archivist continues to endeavour to substantiate these Nazi allegations (the „Jew“ Bauer, the „traitor“ Bauer, the „gay“ Bauer), which were whispered to journalist Ronen Steinke as Bauer’s three great „secrets“, with ever new interpretations of the sources. The credo is that others would have behaved in exactly the same way. Speculation is out of the question, according to the apodictic formula, Bauer was a broken hero, and anyone who claims otherwise is writing the history of saints. Because, of course, they still want to be admirers of Bauer. How else could they continue to swim in the great current of German historiography of success? Only the real „hero“ is not supposed to have existed. The upright anti-Nazi and fighter for human rights. The very thought of this seems to be out of the question today.
Everyone can answer this question for themselves. First and foremost the survivors of Nazi persecution, but also all those who risk their existence and safety today in the fight for human rights. In any case, Fritz Bauer’s life and work cannot be harmed by subsequent attempts to discredit him. Anyone who was locked up in a concentration camp by the Nazis as a resistance fighter, who had to live in exile for thirteen years, who published one of the first books against the impunity of Nazi criminals, who brought Adolf Eichmann, Auschwitz, the crimes of the Wehrmacht, Nazi justice and Nazi medicine to court, who campaigned with all his might after 1945 for the rehabilitation of the right and duty to resist, needs no rehabilitation.