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This news reached us almost in the middle of the summer break in North Rhine-Westphalia. Three well-known personalities, the lawyer Finn Rowold, the journalist Michael Kuttner and the Scandinavia correspondent of the Frankfurter Rundschau Thomas Borchert, have asked the city council of Copenhagen to name a street after the former Hessian Attorney General Dr Fritz Bauer. We at the Fritz Bauer Forum Bochum wish the initiative luck and a speedy success.
The lawyer Dr Fritz Bauer always had very fond memories of his country of exile, Denmark. Especially the support he received from the Danish Social Democrats. And despite the persecution he experienced there during the German occupation, when Danish Nazis and collaborators accused him of having homosexual contacts in order to deport him and hand him back over to the National Socialists, i.e. the concentration camp.
It is a more than desirable side effect of the initiative that it finally corrects the claim made by the Fritz Bauer Institute and the author Ronen Steinke that we need to talk about the fact that Fritz Bauer may have been homosexual. A few years ago, the Institute announced that it had thought long and hard about whether this should be made public. It could hardly have been more embarrassing.
The rumour spreaders fell for the Danish Nazis. This has now been confirmed by the Danish historian Sina Maria Vinther based on her research for the British-American journalist Jack Fairweather, who is writing a new biography of Fritz Bauer. The Institute has also been spreading the rumour for years that Fritz Bauer had signed a petition to the German Nazis in order to be released from the concentration camp. But this signature by Fritz Bauer does not exist. As if that wasn’t enough, the rumour goes on to claim that Bauer was a traitor because he informed the Israelis of the whereabouts of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann. What was treasonous about this, what „serious disadvantage“ it caused to the external security of the Federal Republic and what „favours“ Israel – there is no evidence of this either. The gay Jew and traitor is a prejudice that is played on time and again. It brings its spokespeople into the media. In this case, two new feature films have been made about Fritz Bauer, both of which spread the prejudice about him and generously forgive his homosexuality – after all, Paragraph 175 did exist…
Former Federal Minister of Justice Prof Dr Hertha Däubler-Gmelin , the former Attorney General Prof Dr Erardo Rautenberg , the Managing Director of the Federal Network for Civic Engagement PD Dr Ansgar Klein, the journalist and winner of the Villa Ichon Culture and Peace Prize in Bremen Kurt Nelhiebel, the cultural editor of Weltexpresso in Frankfurt am Main Claudia Schulmerich, the director Ilona J. Ziok (director of „Fritz Bauer – Death in Instalments“) and others, like the author of this text, have written for years against this rumour mill about Fritz Bauer . The founding of the Fritz Bauer Forum in Bochum is one of the results. Why does an institute named after Fritz Bauer, of all people, persistently play to such right-wing and nationalist prejudices, which fuel the already existing anti-Semitism? Only those responsible can answer this question by finally summoning up the courage to correct their mistakes.
The fact that a street in Denmark is now to be named after the upright social democrat and anti-fascist Dr Fritz Bauer, who publicly fought against the National Socialists from the very beginning and was therefore imprisoned in a concentration camp, and that a new travelling exhibition is being created by the Jewish Museum in Copenhagen in cooperation with the new refugee museum („Flugt“) in Varde, gives us hope. Hope that Fritz Bauer’s resistant actions, which are long overdue to be emulated, will finally be given the truthful recognition they deserve in Germany.
Link to the article about the initiative in the Frankfurter Rundschau
There are many opportunities to get involved in setting up the Fritz Bauer Forum and the Fritz Bauer Library. As Fritz Bauer said: „In the fight for human rights“!
You can buy books in the Fritz Bauer Forum’s online shop to support the project. Or you can realise events together with the Forum. The aim is to initiate open discussions on how to promote a world memory that is orientated towards the resistant actions of Fritz Bauer and human rights fighters in general.