Book review: “The prosecutor”, by Jack Fairweather

The prosecutor: the battle of a man to translate the Nazis into justiceBy Jack Fairweather

During a gray winter day in December 1970, Willy Brandt, the first social democratic chancellor in the post-war period of Western Germany, fell on his knees in a monument of Warsaw to the Jews who had fought against the Nazis. His gesture came to illustrate what the Germans call resonant Vergangenheitsbewältigung, efforts to deal with the past. For all the shortcomings of this national effort, most Germans have given an example of remorse that shame the Turkish nationalist leaders equivocal on the Armenian genocide, or Japanese right -wing politicians visiting the Yasukuni war sanctuary in Tokyo who honors criminals class A war A of Class A.

However, in the years which followed the Second World War, many Germans were to various degrees unrepentant, nationalist or self-adjusted. Four years after the Nuremberg Allied military court for the best Nazi leaders, only 38% of Western Germans in the area occupied by the Americans approved other trials for war criminals.

How have so many Germans contributed to the Nazi past? In his captivating and well -documented biography, “the prosecutor”, Jack Fairweather argues that the response partly lies in the work of a German and honorable German Jewish lawyer named Fritz Bauer, who pressed the people of his country “to face to their complicity in the industrialized mass murder of European Jews. »»

A bookish judge in Stuttgart under the Republic of Weimar, Bauer was triple Anathematized in Nazi Germany: he was Jewish, a social democratic enemy of Nazism and a secretly gay man. He and his social democratic colleagues were shaken by the preparation of the conservatives of the establishment who “accompanied Hitler’s desire to upset the democratic order”. Bauer had the chance to survive six terrifying months in concentration camps, where he was beaten several times. He emerged to find a police state where Jewish doctors could not practice and Jewish stores were boycotted, while non -Jewish residents of Stuttgart allowed themselves to live their lives. While Christmas was approaching, Fairweather wrote: “The girls of the newly renowned Adolf Hitler sung have sang Carols”. Bauer fled to Denmark in 1936 and then to Sweden in 1943, after a Danish rabbi warned that the occupant Germans were about to bring together all the Jews in the country.

Fairweather’s book creates an uncomfortable reminder of the number of Germans supported the third Reich. The legal ideal of individual criminal justice collapsed before the more than 250,000 Germans who had served in the SS, murdering Auschwitz and the other death camps in Poland under German control, or within the framework of killers of killers Mobiles called Einsatzgruppn; The former soldiers of the German army who had supported the massacres of Einsatzgruppen, shot the Jews themselves or had used Jews as a slave work, as well as to kill a large number of Soviet war and civil prisoners; Bureaucrats and lawyers who had organized the logistics of the genocide; And the nearly 14 million Germans who had voted for the Nazis in July 1932, although Hitler’s vicious hatred towards the Jews was displayed in “Mein Kampf” and his fulminant speeches.

Back in Germany occupied by the Allies in 1948, Bauer demanded at least a symbolic German calculation with this general complicity. While some skeptics reject trials for war crimes as a veiled tool for Western domination, Fairweather shows a fairly different dynamic. At the start of the Cold War, the Western powers preferred more and more war crimes procedures to set up war crimes in order to fortify Western Germany as an anti-Soviet rampart. Far from being justice being a foreign taxation, here the German prosecutors have continued German trials for German crimes.

In 1956, Bauer became the general prosecutor of the greatest state in Western Germany and issued an arrest warrant against Adolf Eichmann, the fervent Chiefain SS who had designed the expulsion of the Jews from all over Europe to death camps. For a good reason, Bauer feared that the Nazis working in the government of Western Germany could alert Eichmann or educate the investigation. The first head of the new foreign intelligence agency in Western Germany was Reinhard Gehlen, previously the military intelligence chief of the third Reich for the Eastern Front of the Second World War. He knew where Eichmann had gone to the field in Argentina, but did not inform Bauer, rather putting the German prosecutor under surveillance.

When Bauer unexpectedly obtained a tip from a Dachau survivor with the address of Eichmann in Argentina, he did not dare to ask the West German police to pass it. Instead, he transmitted his information to the Israelis and continued to urge them to seize Eichmann – which finally led to his abduction of Buenos Aires and his 1961 dramatic trial before an Israeli court in Jerusalem.

As supported by German journalist Ronen Steinke in his own first -rate biography, Bauer’s greatest success was a sprawling trial of some 20 German officers and civil servants in Auschwitz, held in a Frankfurt courtroom in the middle of the years 60. Bauer wanted to continue not only high camp leaders, but also Germans of lower rank, because each person operating the death camp contributed to the murder of mass. The most devastating testimony came from the survivors of Auschwitz, one of which described the fatal terror of people in the gas chambers, some taking 10 minutes or more to die, in frantically difficulty, their corpses covered with blood from their nose and their ears. An Austrian Jewish survivor recalled the words of a little boy who was to be gassed the next day: “No, I am not afraid. It’s so terrible here, it can only be better up there.

Fairweather writes that Bauer’s story shows “how the holocaust came to define our collective sense of humanity”. However, his book arrives while the main political parties work to eliminate the Holocaust memory outside the conscience of the public. Last year, the alternative of the extremist party hated in hatred of immigrants for Germany became the first far -right group to win a plurality during a state election since the fall of Nazi Germany. The party was led to the victory of Björn Höcke, who despised the first Holocaust memorial in Berlin and said that Germany needed a “180 degrees” to remember its history.

In 2023, the billionaire Elon Musk was approved as “real truth”, an anti -Semitic online article which blamed Jewish communities for having pushed “dialectical hatred against whites” and flooded Western countries with “hordes of minorities ”; Earlier this year, he took the time of his new role as a powerful adviser to President Trump to say to a gathering of AFD by video that Germany has “too much accent on past guilt”. Trump won his second term as president despite dinner in his field of Florida with Kanye West, a frank anti -Semitic, and Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and a denial of the holocaust. Fairweather’s book would be haunting to read at any time; This is particularly bitter today.

The prosecutor:: The battle of a man to translate the Nazis into justice | By Jack Fairweather | Crown | 478 pp. | $ 35