How a gay Holocaust survivor-turned-Nazi hunter took down one of the Reich’s most prominent leaders

He was a methodical and efficiently non-violent Nazi hunter. A dark-eyed chain smoker with the cultivated calm of a judge, Fritz Bauer single-handedly brought dozens of war criminals to justice for an untold number of human rights offenses. But because he was homosexual and embarrassed too many mediocre yet powerful men, he was vilified in his own lifetime as a “degenerate” and “criminal,” He was then lost to history for decades, rather than honored publicly for his courageous advocacy in the shadow of fascism.

Born in 1903 in Stuttgart, Germany, Bauer was raised in an affluent and liberal Jewish family. Though denied entrance to the most elite fraternities because of his heritage, Fritz ultimately thrived in law school and quickly ascended to the position of “assessor judge,” or junior prosecutor — Germany’s youngest on record — at 27.

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Unfortunately, this milestone appointment landed in 1930, just in time for the zealots of the Third Reich to begin dismantling the legal system and the country. A member of the Social Democratic Party, Bauer found himself surrounded by “conservative and authoritarian in spirit” colleagues. He was demoted in 1931 after being smeared by Nazi columnist Adolf Gerlach in a local paper as a “biased” Jew and communist sympathizer incapable of competently doing his job. 

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By 1933, Nazi rule had insured Bauer was arrested while working at his office — without charges — and condemned to the Heuberg concentration camp, where he was targeted aggressively by brownshirt guards for being both Jewish and a political threat to the Nazi regime. Though not labeled with the dreaded “pink triangle,” some accounts of his life suggest Bauer’s unmarried status and progressive leanings had by this point already outed him in the eyes of the fatally homophobic Nazis. 

In November 1933, Bauer was offered exile if he participated in a propagandist PR stunt. In exchange for his signature on a public statement switching allegiance from the Social Democrat to the Nazi party, Fritz was formally discharged as a judge but released from the camps and allowed to escape to Denmark… which wasn’t exactly the reprieve it sounds like.

Bauer was arrested in 1936 for suspicion of homosexual sex with “a male prostitute.” Fritz vehemently denied money being involved and the other man being a sex worker, but he did not refute their involvement and was later forced into another internment camp, this time by Nazi-sympathetic Danish authorities. 

Not long thereafter, Bauer legally married a Danish kindergarten teacher named Anna Maria Petersen and fled secretly via fishing boat to Sweden to wait out the rest of the war. 

The end of WWII by no means meant the end of Nazi influence, however. Fascist ideology still permeated both international politics and local, civilian post-war life. German nationalists continued to support Nazi players even in light of their defeat. Bauer returned home to West Germany in 1949 to finally resume his service as a judge but found a traumatic landscape where men who’d committed genocide against his community were rewarded with positions of ongoing power and influence. Through diligent work, Bauer nonetheless climbed the ranks of the district courts and was appointed state prosecutor in Frankfurt in 1956. 

Bauer’s very rare combination of tangible judicial power and personal camaraderie with other concentration camp survivors put him in the position to actually do something about Nazis living karma-free internationally, though he was forced to hide his Jewish identity, homosexuality, and Holocaust-survivor status in order to get anything done. To this day, biographies of his life tend to downplay or completely erase his homosexuality.

Bauer’s long-game tactics took down one of the major coordinators of the genocide, Otto Adolf Eichman. Eichman literally helped arrange and manage the deportation of Jews into extermination camps. Eichmann was captured in 1945 by the US military but soon escaped to a sedate life in Argentina with the help of a Catholic bishop. Eichmann, like many other Nazi fugitives at the time, made little effort to hide himself or his history — part of the reason he was recaptured was his own son, Klaus, bragging to women about daddy being a Nazi and murderer. 

The rest of the reason was the patience of Bauer, who knew Nazi sympathizers in the West German judicial system would only protect Eichmann by tipping him off, or worse, helping move him with German money. 

So Bauer committed light treason. 

In violation of German law, Bauer bypassed his country’s intelligence entirely, reaching out directly to Israeli Mossad director Isser Harel with Eichmann’s exact location, a recent photo, and details on the family’s braggadocio. Israeli officials worked with Bauer’s tipsters to get Eichmann forcefully extradited for trial from Argentina to Israel — a place where compromised German officials, who initially tried to get Bauer in trouble instead of assisting with the prosecution of a Nazi, couldn’t interfere with justice. 

Eichmann was ultimately found guilty and executed for his participation in the mass extermination of millions of civilians. Back home, Bauer was accused of “fouling his own nest” and received death threats. 

Undeterred, Bauer pushed this victory further by certifying a class-action lawsuit now recognized as the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials. Over the course of several years, the case brought formal charges against 22 members of the SS —the tiniest fraction of the estimated 7000+ Nazi-affiliated individuals believed to assist in running the death camps. 

Though deemed a “failure” by Bauer himself, the trials were pivotal in alerting the world to the secretive, but at that point still broadly covered-up, machinations of the SS. The testimony of the 22 defendants and 800+ sources interviewed across a half-decade of pretrial research became the backbone of our global understanding of what unchecked fascist rule truly looks like. They are preserved in UNESCO’s Memory of the World archives. 

When not trailing and convicting Nazis, Bauer quietly attempted to move the dial of progress by advocating for the decriminalization of homosexuality in the German penal code. In the 1950s and 60s, it was an outright crime to simply identify as gay or queer, with additional charges for participating in same-sex activities.

Bauer was found dead in his own bathtub in 1968 at the age of 64 in what was deemed “suspicious circumstances.” A coroner’s report asserted that Bauer had accidentally died of a combination of sleeping pills and alcohol — not impossible for a man in the highest stress position imaginable. But colleagues at his Humanist Union and in the larger social justice community wondered if, given the years of death threats, Bauer had not perhaps been killed by people who had already proven themselves to be murderers. 

You can learn more bout Bauer’s litany of accomplishments in the film The People vs. Fritz Bauer.