The Nazi Hunters (20 page)

Hitler came to power in late January 1933; by late March, Bauer, along with Kurt Schumacher and other prominent Social Democrats, were dispatched to Heuberg, the first Nazi concentration camp in Württemberg. There was no doubt that he was targeted because of his party affiliation. He was released in November of that same year, and both the Steinke biography and the Frankfurt exhibit declare that this happened only after he and several other prisoners signed a loyalty oath to the new regime. “
We unconditionally support the fatherland in the German fight for honor and peace,” it declared. Schumacher, who would become the postwar leader of the Social Democrats, refused to sign it and was held in a string of concentration camps until he was freed by the British at the end of the war. Bauer always expressed his admiration for Schumacher’s “incredible belief and courage.”

At the Frankfurt exhibit, there was a copy of a newspaper that printed the loyalty oath, listing the released prisoners who signed it. The second
name listed was “Fritz Hauer.” The organizers of the exhibit wrote that off as a typo, and pointed out that there was no other prominent prisoner with a name so close to Bauer’s. They also maintained that other records leave no doubt that Bauer signed. But in her lengthier biography, Wojak made no mention of the loyalty oath, and Ziok also ignored it in her documentary. Both maintained they omitted it because there was no definitive proof that Bauer signed it.

“If he signed it, he did it for his family,” Ziok added. “He did everything to get his family out.” Despite her irritation at what she believed to be the excessive focus on Bauer’s identity as a Jew, she conceded that he had to know that the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis meant that he and his family could be soon persecuted precisely for that reason, even if his initial incarceration was for political reasons.

If the dispute about the loyalty oath seems relatively minor, the controversy about another aspect of Bauer’s life—his sexual orientation—was much more heated. In 1936, he fled to Denmark, where his sister and her husband had already settled two years earlier. At first, he saw the country as a liberal paradise. “
The Danes enjoy their country’s good fortune with a non-brooding, matter-of-factness that always amazes foreigners,” he wrote.

But according to Steinke’s biography and the Frankfurt exhibit, the police in this seemingly liberal country regularly shadowed him and brought him in for questioning about his alleged contacts with gay men. In 1933, Denmark had been the first country in Europe to decriminalize consensual sex between men, but gay prostitution was still outlawed. A police report exhibited in Frankfurt claimed he admitted to having had two sexual encounters but denied paying for sex.

Wojak suggested that the publicizing of questionable police reports appeared to be aimed at besmirching Bauer’s reputation. “
It is playing to prejudices against homosexuals that still exist,” she said. Ziok is convinced that Bauer was “asexual—I don’t think he had sexual contacts with anyone.” But then she added, “Even if he was [gay], that’s his business.” Both of them avoided this topic in their portrayals of Bauer.

Monika Boll, the Frankfurt exhibition’s curator, defended the decision
to include this part of Bauer’s story in the exhibit. “It’s not a matter of seeking to out him,” she insisted as she walked me around the exhibit on opening day. “You’d think that in Denmark he was politically safe. But there, suddenly, he was prosecuted again in a way that touched his personal life. That’s an aspect that must be acknowledged historically. That’s the only legitimate reason to make these files public. They don’t discredit Fritz Bauer; they discredit the authorities who made these observations.”

Ironically, the infighting among those who have given Bauer’s history new prominence often obscured the fact that all the parties basically agree on his major accomplishments. This was more of a split between those who feel that he should be presented in only a positive light and those who feel that the airing of such controversies about his personal life in no way detracts from his stature.

When German forces invaded and occupied Denmark in 1940, Bauer was once again at risk. With the help of Danish Social Democrats, he spent much of his time in hiding.
In 1943, he married Anna Marie Petersen in the Danish Lutheran Church, which by all accounts was a move designed to give him protection. That same year, Hitler ordered the deportations of Jews from Denmark, but the Danish resistance responded by organizing a legendary rescue effort that allowed about seven thousand Jews to escape to Sweden. Bauer, his sister and brother-in-law, and their parents were among them.

In Sweden, Bauer was the editor of
Sozialistische Tribüne,
the émigré publication for German Social Democrats. One of his younger coeditors was the future West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who impressed Bauer with his ability of make friends in international circles. Bauer described him as “
smart like an American.”

When the war ended, Bauer and his family decided to return to Denmark. In his farewell speech to a gathering of anti-Nazi activists on May 9, 1945, right after Germany’s surrender, he spelled out his attitude about the future of his homeland:

Germany is a
tabula rasa
. . . a new and better Germany can and must be built from the foundations up. . . . We recognize Germany’s obligation
to pay the price for the war crimes committed in its name. . . . The war criminals and criminals . . . who brought Nazism to power and started a war, the criminals of Buchenwald, Belsen and Majdanek should be punished with all severity. . . . No one of us demands pity for the German people. We know that Germans will have to work to gain respect and sympathy for years and decades to come.

He also published a book in Sweden that year with the prescient title:
Die Kriegsverbrecher vor Gericht
(The War Criminals in Court). In 1947, he wrote an article entitled “The Murderers Among Us”—which would serve two decades later as the title of Wiesenthal’s first memoirs. Bauer’s choice was almost certainly inspired by the first postwar German film dealing with the unmasking of a war criminal, which bore a title with almost identical wording: “The Murderers Are Among Us.”

Bauer wanted to contribute to the work of rebuilding respect for Germany from the very beginning.
From Denmark, he wrote to his friend Schumacher that he had appealed to the Americans to allow him to travel back to Stuttgart, filling out the numerous forms they requested, but he did not receive permission. He conceded he could not be sure of the reason, but he voiced the suspicion that “they [the Americans] don’t want any Jews” returning to take jobs in the public sector. While Brandt and other colleagues were able to return to Germany soon after the war ended, Bauer only followed in 1949. His first job was in Braunschweig, where he was the director for district courts and then district attorney general. This would be the setting for his first confrontation with those who had eagerly served the Third Reich.

• • •

The case that established Bauer’s reputation as the chief legal challenger of the Nazis did not involve accusations of war crimes or crimes against humanity. There was nothing so grandiose about it. Nonetheless, it centered on a critical question for postwar Germany: how to view those German officers and civilians who attempted to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944.

Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had placed a briefcase with a bomb
under the conference table where Hitler was going over war plans with his senior officers at his Wolf’s Lair headquarters in East Prussia. Because one of the officers happened to push the briefcase behind the leg of the table, Hitler survived the explosion. Were the conspirators heroes or traitors?

As anyone who watched the 2008 movie
Valkyrie
starring Tom Cruise knows, the key player in the drama that followed was Major Otto Remer, the commander of the Guards Battalion Grossdeutschland in Berlin.
He had been wounded eight times during combat, and Hitler had awarded him the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves. There was no question about his loyalty. But during the confusion in the immediate aftermath of the explosion at Wolf’s Lair, the conspirators in Berlin attempted to take command in Berlin. They told Remer that Hitler was dead and instructed him to arrest Propaganda Minister Goebbels.

When Remer showed up at the minister’s office with twenty men to do so, Goebbels informed him that the Führer was very much alive—and that he would prove it. Picking up the phone, he got Hitler on the line, who promptly ordered Remer to arrest the plotters. They were subsequently hunted down and executed or forced to commit suicide. Remer was promoted to major general before the war ended.

In postwar West Germany, Remer helped launch a far-right party, the Socialistische Reichspartei, and mobilized supporters with vitriolic tirades against the country’s newly elected leaders. As his party began to make a mark in regional elections in 1951, Remer attracted national attention.
Der Spiegel,
the weekly newsmagazine, characterized him in terms that echoed early descriptions of Hitler. He was “
39 years old, slim, with an emaciated face and the flaring eyes of the fanatic,” the magazine reported.

Remer charged that Germany’s new democratic leaders were “recipients of orders from foreign powers.” As infuriating as such statements were to the politicians, they were not enough to trigger legal retaliation. But Remer took a step too far during an election rally in Braunschweig on May 3, 1951. He not only defended his actions during the July 20 aborted
coup but added a similar accusation about the plotters. “Those conspirators were to a great degree traitors to their country and were paid by foreign powers,” he declared.

For Bauer, this was an opportunity to take a stand that, in many ways, embodied his approach to the question of how to address Germany’s recent past. He was not interested in trying to punish Remer for his role in rounding up the plotters who had nearly engineered the assassination of Hitler. By prosecuting a defamation case against Remer based on his characterization of the plotters as traitors, Bauer had a larger goal in mind. He wanted to educate the German public about what constituted patriotic behavior during Hitler’s rule.

The trial opened on March 7, 1952, attracting sixty German and foreign journalists. In the Braunschweig courtroom, Bauer offered an impassioned summation with one clear philosophical and political message: “
Didn’t everyone who recognized the injustice of the war have the right to resist and prevent an unjust war?” In fact, he added, “An unjust state like the Third Reich cannot be the object of treason.” There was no evidence to support Remer’s claim that foreign countries had paid the conspirators, but the most important point that Bauer drove home was that these men were acting out of love of their country, which had been betrayed by a monstrous regime.

Privately, Bauer viewed the military conspirators’ motives as not quite as noble as he portrayed them in the courtroom. In a letter he had written in March 1945, he noted: “
The anti-Nazi sentiment [of the July 20 plotters] arose not from ethical or political anti-Nazism, but from the fact that Hitler was losing the war.” Their object in assassinating Hitler was “to move away from the idea of unconditional surrender,” he added, and to allow Germany to emerge from the war as an independent country.

Still, his summation in the Braunschweig trial was a genuine cri de coeur. “
It’s the task of the prosecutors and the judges of the democratic legal state to rehabilitate the heroes of the 20th of July without conditions or limitations because of the facts that we know today and because of the eternal principles of law,” he asserted. He added a personal note about his
high school days in Stuttgart, where one of his fellow students was Claus von Stauffenberg. His former schoolmate and the others involved in the conspiracy “
saw it as their task to protect the legacy of Schiller,” he argued, invoking the country’s beloved poet, playwright, and philosopher. In other words, the conspirators were moved by a deep sense of loyalty to Germany’s history and culture; they were true patriots.

Judge Joachim Heppe, who had served as an officer in Stalingrad and was then a prisoner of war in Russia, declared that he was “deeply moved” by the moral issues Bauer had raised. In fact, Bauer was so focused on making his argument demonstrating the morality of the plotters’ actions that he forgot to ask for a specific sentence for Remer.
The court found him guilty of defamation and sentenced him to three months imprisonment—a sentence that he never served because he fled to Egypt and then returned in time to benefit from another amnesty.

For Bauer, though, the trial was a huge victory. The court had agreed with him that the Third Reich was a regime that did not honor the rule of law; therefore, those who had resisted were morally justified in doing so. The resisters, the court declared in its judgment that echoed Bauer’s sentiments, “
worked for the removal of Hitler, and thereby of the regime he led, entirely from ardent love of the
Vaterland
[fatherland] and selfless awareness of responsibility to their
Volk
[people] extending to unhesitating self-sacrifice. Not with the intent of damaging the
Reich
or the military power of the
Reich
, but only to help both.”

A poll taken before the trial showed that 38 percent of Germans approved of the actions of the German resistance; by the end of 1952, the year of the trial, 58 percent of Germans expressed their approval. Bauer had not only moved the needle significantly, he had also started a debate that would continue for decades.

Such trials, Bauer believed, were critical to making Germans understand what had happened during the nightmare years and what constituted decent—and indecent—behavior. The punishment meted out was far less important than the lessons learned. But he was under no illusion that the battle to educate the public about individual responsibility and morality was over. Despite the positive shift in attitudes after the Remer
trial, he knew that many of his countrymen were still unrepentant about the Nazi era and even willing to protect war criminals. Which made it all that more important to continue pursuing them whenever possible.