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Just in time for the 50th anniversary of the death of Fritz Bauer (1903-1968) on 1 July, Ossietzky Verlag has published an anthology of texts entitled Einem Nestbeschmutzer zum Gedenken (A Nestbeschmutzer in Memory) , which deals with the unexplained circumstances of his death and the hostility to which the legendary Hessian Attorney General was subjected in the post-war period.
The author is the publicist Kurt Nelhiebel, who personally knew the fighter for human dignity and unbending anti-fascist Fritz Bauer and defended him against his critics. Among other things, Nelhiebel was a witness to an argument between the initiator of the Auschwitz trial and the later Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in the course of which the then CDU member of the state parliament reproached Fritz Bauer, who had been persecuted by the Nazis, in 1962, saying that there was still too little time left for a final judgement on National Socialism.
The author of the book was recently honoured with the Federal Cross of Merit (see cover picture).
The remarkable collection of texts emphasises Bauer’s significant life’s work. „The past is alive,“ declared the lawyer. Kurt Nelhiebel’s texts also show how, in recent years, a distorted image of Bauer has been spread in public, which has a lot to do with nationalist and, as its flipside, racist prejudices (see also the research journal Soziale Bewegungen 4/2015 ).
Born to German parents in northern Bohemia in 1927, Kurt Nelhiebel published an article about the Nazi past of the Federal Minister for Expellees Theodor Oberländer (CDU) in the Frankfurt anti-fascist weekly Die Tat in 1959, triggering an avalanche that forced the minister to resign. In 1964, he reminded the Israelitisches Wochenblatt für die Schweiz that Heinrich Bütefisch, Deputy Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Ruhrchemie AG, who had just been honoured with the Grand Federal Cross of Merit, had been sentenced to six years in prison in 1948 for involvement in crimes committed in Auschwitz. Bütefisch had to return the medal on the same day.
In 2010, Kurt Nelhiebel criticised the historical revisionist orientation of the Foundation Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation by its founding director Manfred Kittel in the Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft . Four years later, Kittel was relieved of his post with immediate effect.
In 2014, he denounced the Fritz Bauer Institute’s treatment of its namesake in the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel ; four months later, the director responsible, Raphael Gross, resigned.
In 2014, Kurt Nelhiebel received the Villa Ichon Culture and Peace Prize in Bremen. In 2018, he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in recognition of his services to the reappraisal of Germany’s recent history and to reconciliation and international understanding.