Irmtrud Wojak | The Auschwitz-Trial, Fritz Bauer and the German Society

This August 2025 marks the 60th anniversary of the verdict in the first major Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which took place from 1963 to 1965. The trial, in which numerous Auschwitz survivors testified before a German court for the first time, is considered a turning point in the confrontation with Nazi crimes.

But is this success story justified? What conclusions did the initiator of the trial, Dr. Fritz Bauer, himself a Holocaust survivor and political remigrant, then Attorney General of Hesse, draw from the shocking verdict read out over two days? What made the lawyer refuse to give up despite all the denial of guilt among the German population and drove him ever onward in uncovering Nazi crimes?

Historian Irmtrud Wojak’s lecture examines the Auschwitz trial in the context of Fritz Bauer’s biography and an outdated culture of remembrance. The idea is that in “remembering the crimes,” we failed to ask what this has to do with our own actions in the present.

Header photo: Aerial view of Birkenau from the RAF, smoke rising from the cremation pits (August 1944); aerial view of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Reconnaissance photo taken by the British Royal Air Force, 1944. Photo by Irmtrud Wojak, photographer: Richard Lensit, (c) Fritz Bauer Forum | BUXUS FOUNDATION

Dr. Irmtrud Wojak is a historian, biographer of Fritz Bauer, and initiator of the Fritz Bauer Forum in Bochum, a center for democracy and human rights that opened this year.

An event in cooperation with Situation Kunst (for Max Imdahl) on the occasion of the exhibition totenstill by Dirk Reinartz (October 2, 2025 – November 30, 2025).