With the same single-mindedness with which he rehabilitated the victims of Hitler’s assassination, Bauer set in motion the investigation and prosecution of Nazi crimes like no other jurist. As Hessian Attorney General from 1956 to 1968, he was the key initiator of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials.

Bauer also played an important role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann. As he harboured justified doubts that the German judiciary would demand Eichmann’s extradition emphatically enough and consistently charge him with murder in many thousands of cases, he informed the Israelis of the whereabouts of the notorious “accountant of the final solution” so that Eichmann could be brought to trial in Jerusalem.

During his time in office in Frankfurt am Main, Bauer was also the first federal state in Hesse to significantly advance the reform of the penal system. For him, its humanisation was part of the democratisation of society.

Due to his often provocative behaviour – he once addressed prisoners as “My comrades” – and his intransigence towards Nazi criminals, Bauer became a provocation for the zeitgeist in the restorative climate of the Adenauer era, and not just for right-wing and radical right-wing critics. Essays and speeches with titles such as “Murderers among us” and “At the end were the gas chambers” caused an uproar in the 1950s and 60s, as the majority of Germans wanted to draw a line in the sand.

Anti-Semitic and political hostility therefore accompanied the lawyer’s life. The status quo ante determined – mutatis mutandis – the situation in the young FRG, where civil servants and employees who had participated in the persecution during the Nazi regime returned to their posts and positions, even in high positions. Because Bauer was opposed to society settling into this historical oblivion and striving for a real new beginning, he was met with rejection and rejection; by the diehards, but also by the many opportunists and appeasers.

Attorney General Dr Bauer was far ahead of his time; his legal and socio-political ideas, including those of the International Court of Justice, did not yet meet with the desirable positive response. Society’s indecisiveness with regard to its past, its self-protection from the shock of looking into its own abyss, prevented it from shedding light on history for a long time after Bauer’s death. In the justice system, the Attorney General often said, he lived as if in exile. But he would not be dissuaded from his path of enlightenment and a new democratic beginning.

However, the passing of the emergency laws was a heavy blow for the social democrat and resistance fighter. Bauer saw this step as an irreparable reversion to an authoritarian state; the young democracy gave itself up under the pretence of having to save itself. Did it have so little inner substance? When the Dreher Laws were finally passed by the Bundestag in May 1968, this was the final blow to Bauer’s hopes of a real confrontation with Nazi history.

On 30 June 1968, the lawyer was found dead in his Frankfurt flat. The rooms had been ‘tidied up’, there were no scripts and materials lying around as usual. Everything was gone. The circumstances of Fritz Bauer’s death remain a mystery to this day.

Director Ilona Ziok has meticulously researched archives and unearthed groundbreaking statements by the Hessian Attorney General. In the form of a cinematic mosaic, she has assembled archive material with selected works by classical and contemporary composers and the statements of Bauer’s contemporary witnesses: friends, relatives and fellow campaigners. The result is not only the exciting story of an impressive life, but also an impressive portrait of one of the most important lawyers of the 20th century.