After World War II, Fritz Bauer had no good reason to return to the homeland that wanted him dead. Bauer had been a district court judge in Stuttgart, Germany, in the early 1930s, a social democrat and outspoken critic of then-new chancellor Adolf Hitler. He was also Jewish and gay, an easy Nazi target. In 1933, Bauer was arrested, stripped of his job and sent to prison, where he was beaten almost daily for months.
But Bauer was luckier than most. He escaped Nazi Germany for Denmark in 1936, then emigrated to Sweden in 1943. There, Bauer found a socially progressive society that accepted his Judaism and homosexuality — a far cry from the virulently antisemitic, homophobic and chauvinistic German culture he had left behind. He could have stayed in Sweden and lived a long, safe and comfortable life.
But as Charlotte author Jack Fairweather explores in his compelling new book, The Prosecutor: One Man’s Battle to Bring Nazis to Justice, Bauer instead returned to Germany in 1948 to resume a career in the criminal justice system. Amid a still deeply Nazified society, Bauer became a prosecutor who, at great personal risk, pursued those who were responsible for the genocide. His biggest catch: Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Final Solution to exterminate Europe’s Jews. Bauer was central in helping the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, apprehend Eichmann in Argentina and put him on trial.
Drawing from unpublished personal letters, newly declassified German files, and firsthand interviews with family members and descendants, Fairweather traces Bauer’s life from his early days as a young jurist and activist and his escape from Germany, documenting his long career as an irascible, chain-smoking workaholic who regularly put in 18-hour days. Some of what he unearthed about Bauer, including his involvement with the Mossad, was kept secret from Bauer’s own family.
But Bauer’s greatest achievement wasn’t just the capture of a fugitive war criminal. As Fairweather explains, he forced average Germans to confront their own complicity in Hitler’s rise and the mass extermination of millions. In the process, he began a nationwide reckoning with Germany’s painful past.
Today, it’s hard to imagine a history of World War II that doesn’t center the Holocaust as a defining event. One could mistakenly assume that the Nuremberg trials of 1945 and 1946 brought to justice most of those who were responsible. Yet of the more than 7,000 Schutzstaffel, or SS, officers who worked in Auschwitz-Birkenau, only six were brought to trial before Bauer got involved.
Why? Because much of what is known today about the Holocaust simply wasn’t common knowledge in the years immediately following the war. Average German citizens were either ignorant of the scope of the Holocaust or ready to move on, or they justified Nazi atrocities as the crimes of a few. Many German civilians were indignant that they, who had also suffered during the war, should bear any responsibility for the Holocaust. As West Germany’s chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, put it in 1949, it was time to “let bygones be bygones.”
But as Fairweather points out, after the war, 8 million former Nazi Party members returned to their prewar careers as civil servants and bureaucrats. Some were even recruited as spies for the CIA, which was more concerned about the rise of the Soviet Union and the spread of communism in Eastern Europe than past atrocities.
“No defendant had acted alone. They needed the camp, a community, an entire culture, to support them.”
Jack Fairweather
More than 200,000 former SS officers and concentration camp guards went to work in law enforcement and the judiciary. Nazi doctors who had supervised medical experiments on Jews and dentists who had removed Jews’ gold fillings after they were gassed returned to their practices as though none of it had ever occurred.
“For Bauer,” Fairweather said, “this wasn’t a crime of the few. It was a collective endeavor.” As he writes about the cases Bauer brought starting in 1962:
Auschwitz itself was the crime he planned to prosecute; the defendants were simply the willing hands needed to run the death factory. They were ordinary Germans, and therein lay the trial’s power to implicate German society as a whole. It was true that the defendants had committed monstrous acts individually — Klehr the lethal injector, Kaduk the rapist and murderer, Capesius the supplier of gas. Bauer wanted to evoke their deeds in excruciating detail through witness testimony. But he also wanted his countrymen — the world — to see how their crimes fitted together to make industrial murder possible. No defendant had acted alone. They needed the camp, a community, an entire culture, to support them. That was why it wouldn’t just be a selection of defendants in the dock, but the whole nation.
Fairweather, 47, is a Wales-born journalist and former Middle East war correspondent. He previously wrote The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero Who Infiltrated Auschwitz, which won a 2019 Costa Book Award and will soon be made into a limited television series. While working on that book, Fairweather discovered Bauer’s story.
The Prosecutor would be a thoroughly researched and enlightening read if all it did was examine Bauer’s career. But Fairweather went even further, peeling back the layers on Bauer’s personal life, much of it previously unknown. Despite two earlier biographies originally published in German, no one had ever dug into Bauer’s life as a gay man. Fairweather discovered a cache of Bauer’s personal letters that he wrote to a friend in an archaic German script. Even his German researcher couldn’t make heads nor tails of it.
“She had the idea of sending it to her 90-year-old mother,” Fairweather recalled in an interview with Seven Days. The mother, who had grown up during Hitler’s rise — her father had been a Nazi administrator in occupied Poland — was able to interpret them.
“There’s something incredibly poignant about having the daughter of that man piece together what was in those letters,” Fairweather said, “which was the personal life of Bauer.”
Those letters provided Fairweather with the kind of cinematic moment that all biographers dream about: the discovery of one of Bauer’s romantic partners, the late Paul Wagner.
Fairweather found Wagner’s daughter living in a small house in Copenhagen. During their conversation, she retrieved a dusty box of her father’s letters stashed in the attic, which, because she didn’t speak German, had sat unread for decades. In it were dozens of letters that Bauer had written to her father over many years.
Their contents revealed a profoundly intimate relationship between the two men and a side of them that no one, including their own families, had ever known.
“That was very magical,” Fairweather recalled. The correspondence only highlighted the sacrifice that Bauer had made in foregoing this relationship in order to return to postwar Germany.
The Prosecutor, which author Sebastian Junger touts on the book jacket as a “tour de force of both historical research and absolutely terrific writing,” often reads more like a classic cloak-and-dagger novel than a history book.
There’s also something chilling about reading The Prosecutor and recognizing its relevance to contemporary politics. As many Americans wonder how their own deeply divided country, with a government showing authoritarian tendencies, will ever heal and rebuild its democratic foundations, Bauer’s story offers some guidance. It wasn’t until the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, which Bauer brought in 1963, that West Germany began its sustained and ongoing acknowledgement of its complicity in the Holocaust.
Today, thanks in large part to Bauer’s work, Germany serves as an international model for historical reckoning and national reconciliation — a task that Americans themselves may one day face.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Man of Convictions | A new book recounts how a gay Jewish lawyer in postwar Germany brought Nazi war criminals to justice”
This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2 2025.
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