Fritz Bauer, the Jewish prosecutor behind the West German trials

[Archie]

I saw in the NYT book section that there is a new book on Fritz Bauer, The Prosecutor by Jack Fairweather. There is at least one earlier book on Bauer by German journalist Ronen Steinke (which is available in English): Fritz Bauer: The Jewish Prosecutor Who Brought Eichmann and Auschwitz to Trial.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/book ... ather.html

On a gray wintry day in December 1970, Willy Brandt, the first postwar Social Democratic chancellor of West Germany, fell to his knees at a Warsaw monument to the Jews who had fought there against the Nazis. His gesture has come to exemplify what the Germans resonantly call Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the striving to cope with the past. For all the shortcomings in this nationwide effort, most Germans today set an example of remorse that shames Turkish nationalist leaders equivocating about the Armenian genocide, or rightist Japanese politicians visiting the Yasukuni war shrine in Tokyo that honors Class A war criminals.

Yet in the years after World War II, many Germans were in varying degrees unrepentant, nationalistic or self-justifying. Four years after the Allied military tribunal at Nuremberg for top Nazi leaders, only 38 percent of West Germans in the American-occupied zone approved of further trials for war criminals.

How did so many Germans become contrite about the Nazi past? In his gripping and well-researched biography, “The Prosecutor,” Jack Fairweather argues that the answer lies in part in the work of an irascible, honorable German Jewish lawyer named Fritz Bauer, who pressed the people of his country “to face their complicity in the industrialized mass murder of Europe’s Jews."

So then. The war crimes trials were winding down throughout the 1950s and most people were ready to move on. But then by the early 1960s the Jews decided it was time for everyone to get a booster shot of propaganda!

Our opponents will often play dumb: "How could a hoax like this have been brought about?" But it seems to me that at every step of the way we see Jewish activists in key positions to do just that. We don't even need to speculate much. They tell us the names in the mainstream books. To me, demonstrating the potential for a hoax (or more broadly a narrative constructed and enforced for Jewish and other interests) is absolutely trivial. And note that this is the case even if Bauer 100% believed all of it. Whether he was knowingly promoting falsehoods or "sincerely" promoting falsehoods is not an especially crucial distinction.

Here are the open paragraphs of Fairweather's intro.

Bauer Intro 1.jpg (35.72 KiB) Viewed 83 times

With just a little tweaking, you can easily reorient all of this in a revisionist direction.

[Hans]

While you're tweaking, could you also include details on which West German trials against perpetrators of Nazi state violence Fritz Bauer was responsible for. And, just as importantly, which ones he was not?