The first Auschwitz trial began in Frankfurt am Main in December 1963. The total of six trials against members of the SS guard team at the Auschwitz extermination camp played a central role in the confrontation with National Socialism and represented a first turning point in dealing with Nazi crimes. The driving force behind the trials was the Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer, whom Robert M. W. Kempner, Chief Prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials, described as the „greatest ambassador the FRG ever had“.
After the Second World War, Fritz Bauer not only stood up for humanity and justice, he also rejected the trend in post-war justice to close one’s eyes to the atrocities of the Nazis and to have known nothing. Because of his minority position in the judiciary and because he held up a mirror to German society, the steadfast democrat was not spared hostility and death threats, especially since the Auschwitz trial. As a social democrat, Bauer nevertheless believed in progress, and as a lawyer and criminal law reformer, he replaced reasons of state at all costs with the protection of human dignity, especially against state violence – a major step towards the democratic reorganisation and humanity of the legal system.
On 13 May, Irmtrud Wojak will present not only the work of Fritz Bauer, but also the Forum for Human Rights named after him, which is currently being established in Bochum, in her lecture „Fritz Bauer – Social Democrat, Lawyer with a Sense of Freedom and Advocate for Survivors“.
Paintings by Reinhold Spratte are on display in Axel Echeverria’s constituency office until 13 May. The latter is working together with the Fritz Bauer Forum. Spratte designed the covers for the Fritz Bauer Library book series (in the BUXUS EDITION), some of which can be seen in the exhibition.
Irmtrud Wojak is Managing Director of BUXUS STIFTUNG gGmbH and founder of the Fritz Bauer Forum in Bochum. She is a qualified historian (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University, Hanover), author and curator. Her research focuses on contemporary legal history, exile and political cultures of remembrance. As a Frieda L. Miller Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, she investigated the resilience of individuals who maintain a standpoint based on human rights and humanity even under risk and in extreme situations. In 2014, she began the research project of the interactive Fritz Bauer Library. In 2004, Wojak curated the first major exhibition on the Auschwitz trial, and in 2009 she published the authoritative Fritz Bauer biography.
