Jack Fairweather

Jack Fairweather is the bestselling author of The Volunteer, the Costa Prize winning account of a Polish underground officer who volunteered to report on Nazi crimes in Auschwitz. The book has been translated into 25 languages and forms the basis of a major exhibition in Berlin. He has served as the Daily Telegraph’s Baghdad bureau chief, and as a video journalist for the Washington Post in Afghanistan. His war coverage has won a British Press Award and an Overseas Press Club award citation.

While living in Baghdad, Jack met his wife-to-be and lived in the house of Saddam’s former perfume supplier alongside other reporters. As the violence escalated in Iraq, Jack was fortunate to survive a suicide bomb attack, a kidnapping attempt, and almost daily mortar attacks around their house. He is the author of A War of Choice, and The Good War, a Times book of the year.

His recent book, The Prosecutor: One Man’s Battle to Bring Nazis to Justice, Jack Fairweather brings to life the extraordinary journey of Fritz Bauer a gay, Jewish judge from Stuttgart who survived the Nazis and made it his mission to force his countrymen to confront their complicity in the genocide. In this deeply researched book, Fairweather draws on unpublished family papers, newly declassified German records, and exclusive interviews to immerse readers in the shadowy, unfamiliar world of postwar West Germany where those who implemented genocide run the country, the CIA is funding Hitler's former spy-ring in the east, and Nazi-era anti-gay laws are strictly enforced. In a time when the history of the Holocaust is taken for granted, The Prosecutor reveals the courtroom battles that were fought to establish its legacy and the personal cost of speaking out. The result is a searing portrait of a nation emerging from the ruins of fascism and one man's courage in forcing his people––and the world––to face the truth.

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