The Holocaust's Hidden Hero: Meet Fritz Bauer

Arnold00:00:00

Imagine a history of the 20th century in which the Holocaust is only a footnote to the Second World War, where the encyclopedia entry for Auschwitz describes the flourishing chemical industry in the nearby town, but omits the gas chambers where school textbooks describe Hitler as, quote, gifted in a variety of ways. And limit the discussion of the mass murder he orchestrated to just 47 words, concluding that no more than 100 people knew about it.This isn't an abstract thought experiment.This was West Germany in the years following Hitler's defeat, when the Holocaust was all but forgotten and the Allies sanctioned the return of millions of former Nazis to forge a new country to serve as a bulwark against Communism.That didn't stop Fritz Bauer, who is 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. We're going to talk to award winning journalist Jack Fairweather about his book the Prosecutor Next on St. Louis in tune.Welcome to St. Luis and tune and thank you for joining us for fresh perspectives on issues and events with experts, community leaders and everyday people who make a difference in shaping our society and world. I'm Arnold Stricker along with co host Mark Langston. Greetings to you, Mark.

Mark00:01:26

Good, good day.

Arnold00:01:28

It is a good day, even though it's, it looks like it's, it's horrible outside. It's cloudy, it's rainy.

Jack00:01:33

It's just officially into fall.

Arnold00:01:35

Here we are.

Jack00:01:36

Okay.

Arnold00:01:36

And finally we've got some fall weather.

Jack00:01:38

Yep.

Arnold00:01:39

Folks, we're glad that you joined us today. We want to thank our sponsor, Better Rate Mortgage for their support of the show. You can listen to previous shows@stl and tune.com.please help us continue to grow by leaving a review on our website, Apple Podcast or your preferred podcast platform. Our thought for the day is by Albert Einstein. No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

Jack00:02:06

He thinks on a whole different plane.

Arnold00:02:08

A whole different plane. I'm going to repeat that again. No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.And that really exemplifies our conversation that we're going to have with Jack Fairweather today about his book, the Prosecutor. Jack, welcome to St. Louis in Tune.

Mark00:02:25

Hi. Thanks for having me.

Arnold00:02:27

I was really amazed. I want to give a little background about you.Jack's the best selling 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's been translated into 25 languages and forms the basis of a major exhibition in Berlin.He served on the Daily Telegraph's Baghdad bureau and is a video journalist for the Washington Post in Afghanistan. You've been. Been around, you've done your work on the front lines seriously, in some very serious areas.This is an area that there's a front there too, but it's. It's like a historical front that you were really delving into in getting into Fritz Bauer. What was the impetus getting into Fritz Bauer?

Mark00:03:15

You mentioned the book the Volunteer about the war hero who volunteered to report and expose Nazi crimes and Auschwitz and to try and stop the killing. Of course we know that mission did not succeed. And it was through that book that I started wondering how did we come to know about Auschwitz?How did it lodge in our popular consciousness?And came to the shocking realization that it wasn't this obvious thing at the end of the Second World War, that it actually took a real battle to make people pay attention.And that was the battle that was waged by Fritz Bauer, this extraordinary figure from history who's really unknown to us in the US Some of your listeners might have heard of his name in connection with the capture of Adolf Eichmann. But for me it was became clear he was a seminal figure in helping us come to terms with the Holocaust.And as you read from the intro of the book at the start of this segment, there is this terrifying prospect that we can't, we need to get our heads into when approaching the book, which is a world in which Nazis are back in power. No one's talking about the Holocaust. There has not been been the reckoning that we take for granted.And I really wanted to plunge readers into that dark and terrifying world. Especially so for a gay Jewish man seeking to make his countrymen come to terms with the past.

Arnold00:04:59

You've done a great job of laying out the historical aspect of what was going on before the war and then during the war and after the war. And there's a lot of people involved and I'm glad I. When I got to the end of the book, then I saw, oh, here's the list of the people.Because I was trying to keep them straight in my mind. But the research on this is great. And I saw a previous interview you've.This is a book that could be like a dissertation, but it's very readable and it's historical in the fact that you get into some details, Jack, that I never knew about.And frankly, I always thought, gee, everybody knew about this based upon, I guess, the Allies had discovered the camps and had made it known to the world. But that blew my whole understanding of that out of the water. And here we are 80 years later.But this really didn't get a kind of a start until 20 years after the war when the Auschwitz trial began. Am I correct with that?

Mark00:06:00

That is a really important point of reference for readers and like myself coming to the story is that we tend to think of like Nuremberg. We've all heard of Nuremberg and we think that was the big trial at the end of the war. Nazis held to account and sort of job done.And it was an incredible feat at the time in terms of holding Nazi war leaders to justice and forging new international laws to hopefully prevent anything like World War II happening again. But there was a big sort of missing piece there which was the fact that 7 million Germans had belonged to the Nazi party.And how do you bring a country that had been so complicit in the crimes of the leadership to recognize its past? And it was not a simple answer to that, but there was a very clear need from the perspective of Fritz Bauer to force that reckoning.And it's true that this is a sweeping epic of a book, but I think what I really wanted to hold it together with was Fritz Bauer's perspective and just this kind of extraordinary courage of one man and bending the arc of history towards justice. And of course every, every book has its, has its heroes, but I think really in the case of Fritz Bauer that's.Well, he really does deserve the center stage, not least because he has been so acknowledged unacknowledged for so long. And that thought of a Jewish man who has narrowly survived the Nazis.He'd been thrown into a concentration camp, managed to escape and into exile in Denmark and Sweden, on the run with his family.The thought of him getting on board a train to go back to Germany at the end of the war and take up a job as a small time prosecutor and that he would come back to Germany with this map, with this extraordinary map and vision in his mind for how to transform the country.And I was writing of course about 1940s 50s Germany, but it was, it's hard to not think about like the lessons of today in terms of how, how important it is to think about our own agency in sort of dark and difficult times. And I think Bauer's story is really inspiring. Like he country's 7 million Nazis didn't want to hear about Auschwitz. Took him 20 years.He made sure they heard about Auschwitz through his landmark trial in Frankfurt, which was his, one of his crowning Achievements.

Arnold00:09:11

I want to mention to listeners that Jack is going to be at the Jewish Book Festival December 11th and that particular aspect of the festival is going to take place at the St. Louis County Library, the Clark family branch on South Lindbergh.So you can see him there, listen to a talk he's going to give, purchase the book and get the book ahead of time because it's frankly, it's eye opening. When I went through this and was reading, you gave some, I guess that Fritz Bauer had done some research.How many of the residents of Germany believed that they were the Nazis were capable of this and very few were. They didn't think nobody was going to be. We didn't do anything. There was nothing like that.And then the turnaround that you talked about, it was amazing to me that how information and misinformation can be hidden, maybe it's not amazing, can be hidden or distracted or given out to people that they have no clue what's going on other than people who are engaged. But that's part of the democratic process, that's part of being informed. And then the press was being suppressed at the time. Can you get into it?Was this like the perfect storm back then?

Mark00:10:30

Oh yeah, yeah. I think it's really, yeah, really important to remember like the circumstances after Nuremberg.Germany devastated by the war, divided between east and west rapidly the major fault line of the Cold War. And the Americans and the Allies who were rebuilding the.The west really had this imperative to get the country to stand up quickly on its own two feet.They wanted Germany to West Germany to rearm and take its part in NATO against the Soviet threat and were prepared to turn a blind eye to the crimes of the past.Of course some of the most egregious Nazis could not were beyond the pale but provided you paid lip service and it was easy enough to hide your CV and no one was really asking questions. And the first West German Chancellor, Conrad Adenauer appointed us as Chief of Staff. And this I just find extraordinary.I'm sure your listeners will too.But his Chief of staff, the man tasked with rebuilding West Germany, was one of the chief architects of the Nuremberg Race Laws that had provided the legal framework for the Holocaust. And this man, Hans Glovka, hadn't here hadn't been a member of the Nazi Party. He had applied but got rejected for various reasons.He didn't change the fact that he enacted Nazi policies to the hilt. This was the man who, yeah, played a similar role as architect of West Germany and key American interlocutor and helped Bring in a vast number of.For the Nazis back to their old posts in the government. And from Adenauer and Globka, forged this narrative.And I think we're quite sensitive today to this idea of different narratives, alternative facts, and this relative truth.And I think when you see it playing out in the book through, through Adenauer and Globka presenting a different narrative to World War II, one in which it was the Germans who were the victims, not the Jews, not Poles or Russians. It was Germans who were the victims of Hitler, the victims of Allied bombing.And this really resonated with Germans who didn't want to think about their own crimes, wanted to blame others, wanted to feel, yeah, like they, they were the good guys. And this was the founding story of West Germany and one which from Fritz Bauer's perspective, simply could not stand.It was terrifying for him to see reality being twisted in this way. And furthermore that victims and survivors like himself could not get their voices heard.And that was where he hit upon this kind of radical idea in some ways, which was to use the law courts to begin to force change. If he could hold one Nazi to account, he could bring a bit of awareness to Germans around him and. And bit by bit begin to change opinions.And just, just for context, when Fritz Bauer took up his first job in this small town, Braunschweig, and in 1948, 9, he was in his office while his sort of fellow prosecutor was a man who had signed death sentences for 15,000 disabled kids for their death. The chief of police was a former SS officer in Krakow. He would arrange the deportations of Poles and Jews to Auschwitz.He was surrounded by more criminals of the highest order.And it was one of those, one of those situations that I think again, we're quite familiar with today in that it's very hard for people just to speak the truth then and to say, this isn't okay, what is happening here, this prejudice, this oppression, these people, what they are doing in charge. And. And yeah, that was Bowers role. He had to be extraordinarily political and careful.He would go for a go out to a local bookshop and hear his fellow colleagues whisper, whisper as he passed. Oh, there's another Jewish, should have been gassed.Like this is like a credibly prejudice, dark world, twisted world in many ways, in which the values that we take for granted, that we learned from the Second World War were not in place. And one, I think that's really important to realize the role of the US and the Allies in buttressing this.And I Wanted to tell not just the story of Fritz Bauer, but also the story of how that West German state was built in such a corrupt fashion by the US the head of the German intelligence service was a general called Reinhard Galen, who had worked as head of intelligence for Hitler in the east and was initially entirely funded by the CIA, backed by them, and encouraged to spy on West Germans like Fritz Bauer. Suppress the newspapers, fear the country, towards silence about the past. And this was the. This was the battle the Bauer faced.Like, how do I, as a gay Jewish man in this intolerant, still highly Nazified society, how do I get my voice heard? How do I get other people to hear the voices of survivors?And, yeah, that's the story of the book, and one that I. Yeah, I really hope does resonate with people today. I.The book came out earlier this year, and I got to speak to audiences around the country, and so many just asked me, like, how do you change the mindset of a country? Is Bauer's secret sauce. How did he do it? I didn't.When I began writing the book five years ago, I didn't realize there would be writing such a blueprint for our own time. And. Yeah.And yet history never repeats itself, of course, but there are so many lessons for us and so much to really inspire us when it comes to Fritz Bauer's story.

Jack00:17:43

Jack, will you be speaking at the Jewish Book Festival? Are you going to talk or are you just going to talk to folks individually or are you.

Mark00:17:52

I will give a talk and I will get read for. Take you deep into Fritz Bauer's life and world and give you a real sense of some of his extraordinary battles that he took on and.Yeah, and also share some of the research that goes into the making of a book like this.

Jack00:18:13

I'm amazed that I have never heard of the name Fritz Bauer before. And it seems like he was a very pivotal individual during and after the war and has a lot. Did a lot of contributions.And it's amazing to me, that's a name in history that just hasn't surfaced. Thank goodness for you. And as you said, it's a dark and terrifying world, and boy, it was.And I worry that people nowadays don't really grasp what happened then and how that can be repeated. And I don't know if we've got Fritz Bauer folks around much anymore.

Mark00:18:51

Yeah, I think that's why his story is so important, because we do just take for granted our knowledge of the Holocaust. Right. Like we think end of the war, confetti, soldiers parading through the streets. Job done.And there is this missing piece in our education around the Holocaust. Like we learn about the terrible things and then we don't actually connect it to our own time.We don't ask the question of like, how did, how did we get that knowledge of the Holocaust? It wasn't. That's what Bower's story is so important for reminding us that it wasn't just delivered in 1945 whole. It had to be fought for.And that's why his story. This isn't. This is a story set in West Germany, but it's really a story for us all. It's this battle for.For our knowledge of the Holocaust and the battle to confront mankind's worst crimes.And B wasn't simply fighting against former Nazis in his own government, also fighting against global indifference and that desire to look away, to not confront the hard truths of the past. And that's one we can relate to today for sure. And it's one that. It's one that Bauer was so attuned to.He was someone whose whole life was defined by this battle against the forces of Nazism, both as a young activist lawyer and judge in stuttgart in the 1920s and 30s. But then in post war Germany, those same forces that would. That he saw acting to corrupt the sort of emergence of a new Germany.And I think readers will. Yeah. Of the book, you will be shocked by how dark and unknown this history is in the post war and yeah. And Bowers role in. Yeah.Doing some extraordinary things like tracking down Adolf Eichmann. We many of your listeners will be familiar with the film about Eichmann or read some of the accounts by his captors from Mossad.What perhaps not familiar with is the story of how he was uncovered in the first place, which was by Bauer getting a tip off and from a source in Argentina and then having to track down Eichmann himself with the help of this sort and eliciting the help of Mossad very much. Mossad weren't interested tracking down old Nazis as they saw it in the 1950s when Israel was battling for its survival.Bower had to make a number of trips to Israel to force the Mossad director to take up the case and was the orchestrator of the kidnapping operation. And yeah, I think it's just. It's a story of just courage and adversity in the face of, yeah, really extraordinary opposition.And Bauer was really lonely and isolated in so much of his life. It's worth noting that his being gay was. Had huge implications like in.In Denmark and Sweden, both countries that had liberalized anti homosexuality laws in the in the 30s where he had been able to live as a gay man.He was returning to a Germany that kept in place this anti gay laws that had been instigated by the Nazis, some of the most pernicious and yeah, dangerous lawyer people in history. And they remained in Place until 1968 when the first liberalizations began to happen.So Bao was forced to live secret, in hiding and keep a part of himself undercover as he himself was seeking to expose the Nazi pass of those around him.

Jack00:23:40

We're so thankful for Bauer and what he did. I don't know if we have to go to a break yet, but.

Arnold00:23:45

Yeah, Mark, let's take a break because there's a lot of good stuff that we've just talked about that I want to peel back a little bit more about Fritz Bauer. This is Arnold Stricker with Mark Langston. We're talking to Jack Fairweather. He's the writer and author.He's a journalist, but he's the author of the Prosecutor.And he's going to be speaking at the Jewish book festival at St. Louis County Library on December 11th at 7pm you can get some tickets and information at jccstl.com jccstl.com we'll be right back after this break. Everyone in St. Louis promises a better mortgage rate, but what you really need to turn that perfect house into your dream home is a better mortgage.At Better Rate Mortgage, we open the door to so much more. Whether you're purchasing your first home or taking cash out to make your dream home even dreamier. Our door is open. Come on in and get started. Today.We'll show you how. Call Sean directly at 314-375-3293 or online@betterratemortgage.com Remember, at Better Rate Mortgage, a better rate is just the beginning.Betterratemortgage.com and mls.id 401335 an equal housing lender. I want to welcome you back to St. Louis in tune with Arnold Stricker and Mark Langston.We're talking to Jack Fairweather, the author of the Prosecutor. He's going to be speaking at the Jewish Book Festival at the St. Louis County Library, Clark Family Branch on South Lindbergh.For more information, go to jccstl.com and prior to the break, Jack, we were talking a little bit in some detail about Fritz Bauer and the things that he was up against and thinking about back in history.I know Mark's got a question, but I'm going to try to set this up for him and allow you to think through what I'm saying, because I'm going to want you to elaborate a little bit more.In thinking about all the people that were significant during post war Germany and really Japan post World War II, this individual was really a hinge point. He was a pivot point that had tremendous amount of stress on him. He was very strategic. He was very persistent. He sought after the truth.But he had the Soviet Union, he had the Cold War in his face. He had the CIA against him. He had really Israel as a new country that really wasn't wanting to pursue some of this thing except on their own terms.He waged a public campaign on his own. He was giving information and talking to those people who were agreed with him or who were inquiring about wanting to know the truth.And he had witnesses who really didn't care anymore. They were going to tell the truth no matter what, because it was the truth. It wasn't something they were interested in covering up.So this man, Fritz Bauer, is someone, folks, that you really need to get to know, because he is really important.

Jack00:26:36

My only question about Fritz is what motivated him? What was the spark that made him.

Arnold00:26:40

Good question.

Jack00:26:41

Really, really want to pursue this. This seemed like a burning, burning in his heart and his soul. Something that he just would not let go, which we're thankful for. We don't know much.I don't know much about Fritz Bauer. I'm finding out more and more about him. I want to know more about him, but I'm just wondering what that spark, what really motivated this.You may not even know, Frank. Maybe none of us know, but what could have made him really pursue this? He was like a dog wanting a bone. He was really after this.It was pretty intense. It sounds like.

Mark00:27:14

Yeah, in some ways that's the question I set myself to answer with the book and encourage readers to turn to the pages, because it's a man's life and mission and plays out over time.And I think that's one of the great powers of biography, is getting to show the inner workings of someone's heart and soul over as they grow and develop. And I think the short answer to your question is, of course, that Bauer had a lot of anger.He had seen family and friends caught up in the machinery of death of the Nazis. He had his livelihood and home, his whole world, and Stuttgart destroyed.And there's a lot of anger and passion directed at those who thought they could get away with it and just walk back into their old jobs. But I think there's a sort of deeper vision in Bowers story that makes him not.Makes him different to other Nazi hunters that we know of, like Simon Wiesenthal or Tuvia Friedman, who were all about tracking down the perpetrators in the name of justice. Bauer had this vision for Germany that was so striking and different that I think can be quite inspiring for us today. Inspiring or.Yeah, like how we want to think about where the country goes and how indeed we set about steering a country in that direction. He, Bauer had a vision for a current and liberal and progressive Germany.One that he had glimpsed as a young man, as a young student, but one that he lived through as coming out as a gay man in, you know, in Denmark during his exile there in. When he found himself in one of the most liberal societies in the world at the time, was able to live freely.And that sort of vision, that positive vision is one that he brought back. And it's. He held. He had to hold to lots around him that was utterly depressing. So many sort of attacks against him.The fact that he had to hide himself away and bury so much of who he was. But he never really lost sight of that greater vision and this idea that was attached to it.That is I sort of call to action to us all today, which was he came to the realization that he wasn't going to get Nazis to confess in the dark. He called. He got so many bronze release of justice in the courtroom and heard them mount their defenses. Not a single one ever said, you know what?I was wrong, I'm sorry. They were all had their excuses, their reasons, their denials.And what Bauer realized was through the drama of the courtroom was that he wasn't playing to the Nazis in the dark. He wasn't possibly even playing to press galleys gallery or the immediate audience.He was making a case to the next generation that was coming through that he hoped would be receptive to a different idea for what Germany could become. And when he staged this seminal trial in Frankfurt in the 1960s, in fact, a lot of West German school kids got to come. They were busted.He made sure to arrange it because he really wanted them to. Yeah, hear the. The witnesses speak their truth and learn from their experiences. And Bauer died in.In the summer of 1968, which, as in the US was an absolutely seminal year in. In West Germany, it was marked this sort of explosion of new ideas.And in West Germany, they carried this added resonance in which young West Germans began to question really for the first Time what it was their parents had done during the war. And Barrel was so seminal in asking that question in the first place.Giving those young West German, both students and young people the knowledge that they needed to use to confront their parents and.And in the process begin to change was it that was into the country that we know today and like that arc of history and that ability to bend the whole country to a. Away from authoritarianism, away from fascist ideas to a sort of different idea of itself.That's why you should read this book, why Bauer is such an incredible figure for us today because he had this bigger vision that drove him. It wasn't just justice, it was something bigger.

Arnold00:33:23

Seems like there were pivot points, there were certain points that really made an impact that he was doing. One was the trial that he started doing.Another one was the youth movement that you just mentioned because he was turning the tide with some of the youth. Some of the youth were though still in that old.I think they were taking their parents viewpoint because there was still anti Jewish, anti Semitic kinds of activity directed at some Jews in Germany. But then it seemed like that the last big kind of turning point was the Auschwitz visit by the.At the trial where they went actually to Auschwitz and Birkenau and saw and put their hands into what was left of people. That was. That really even changed the judge who was a very staunch, if I might say he was a very staunch Nazi or from the old guard.Was he that strategic in what he was doing or were these things that were just evolving and growing from his main focus?

Mark00:34:26

It's. He saw Auschwitz as being really seminal to our understanding of the Holocaust.And it is, it's just a return listeners to this mindset which is so shocking to us today. In 1950s, no one was really talking about Auschwitz.Primo Levy wrote in Alexo just he had written his amazing memoir directly after the war and struggled to find a publisher and in 1955 wrote no one wants to hear about the camps. And yeah, it was the case that Auschwitz was not this seminal place in our understanding of Nazis and the worst that mankind can do.And Bowers had a different view. He saw that it was at the heart of the Holocaust and it was. He wanted a trial that could effectively put a itself at the center of proceedings.And he had this, yeah, very stunning idea behind the trial that he wouldn't go after the sort of higher ranking officials that is necessarily.He wanted to have some of the guards, the orderlies, the lorry drivers, the gas chamber operators, the sort of the Regular people who had run the camp.And because he wanted ordinary Germans to see themselves in those perpetrators and recognize the way in which Nazism has played out across German society, that it took a community, it took a culture, it took a whole people to enable industrialized mass murder in Auschwitz. And that was just a really extraordinary vision.What he was having to battle with was the fact that that West German law had deliberately not taken up the international law laid down and Nuremberg that recognized things like genocide and crimes against humanity. So in West German law, when Bauer was operating, you could only try Nazis for individual murders.And that created an absurd situation in which you had someone who had operated the gas chamber of Auschwitz. Like, how do you try him for an individual murder?Like, how do you, like, produce evidence to show his involvement in the death of a single individual when he was responsible or took part in the mass murder of millions?And Bauer was also battling against the court system to change that he wanted to West German law that are absolutely necessary that it changed to recognize genocide and mass murder. And so this was. These were some of the. Some of the things he was fighting against.And there was a time when the trial itself was really struggling because his prosecutors were failing to make the case against the defendants because they were having to wrestle with, did they do this single crime?And the witnesses took the stand and they would be asked, so did you see this defendant shoot this individual on this particular day at this hour 20 years ago? Because, of course, this trial took place and began in 1963. 60. And so almost 20 years after the fact.And the defense lawyers could all just say, oh, how do you, how can you remember those details? There were so many years ago, and it was all fuzzy and no one knew anything.And they were able to make the past seem indistinct and inexact and pretend that none of the defendants really knew what was happening in the camp. And that sets the scene of.For the sort of denouement of the book and this extraordinary moment of Cold War drama when Bauer said, enough of this, let's take the court to Auschwitz. Auschwitz, which was in Poland, Communist Poland, behind the Iron Curtain.He had to do behind the scene maneuverings to get the Polish government and the West German government to agree. But in the end, he succeeded in bringing the court over the Iron Curtain to Auschwitz itself.The judges and the prosecutors, the defense lawyers, and even one of the defendants came as well, along with hundreds of journalists. And for many people, this was the first time they had seen images, they'd seen TV footage of Auschwitz.People had by the 1960s heard about gas chambers. No one had seen what one looked like and not had. No one had seen Auschwitz.And, and that was just incredibly powerful moment in our collective reckoning with the past. Those images of the ruined gas chambers in Birkenau getting beamed around people's homes around the world thanks to that trial.And Bauer really put Auschwitz on the, on the map of our collective consciousness. And of course for us all, everyone who's listening, we all know what that means now.And I wanted this book to really, yeah, give credit, Hugh Bauer, to the person who really helps get us to the right view of Auschwitz's place in history.

Jack00:40:38

How did you become acquainted with Fritz Bauer? Where did your paths cross? Where did you all of a sudden say, hey, I want to write a book on that is about Fritz Bauer?

Mark00:40:49

Yeah. So I was at the end of my last book, the Volunteer, about this Polish operative who infiltrated Auschwitz to report on Nazi crimes.And I was writing the list of characters that goes in the back of the book that, that then which has like small, small synopsis of their lives. And I was looking through the list of the perpetrators from the camp. So many of them escaped justice at the end of the war.And that shocking to me because I did not know there was this giant gap in justice in post war Germany, but there was this one common denominator running through their biographies. Finally brought to justice in 1965 at the end of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial by. Led by Fritz Bauer.And so I was like, oh, who is this Fritz Bauer who seems to have played such an important role?And that led me to, yeah, his extraordinary story of escaping the Nazis and then fashioning a vision that was to transform not just West Germany, but our collective consciousness of. About the Holocaust.

Jack00:42:09

The extraordinary story I think pretty much says it all about Fritz Bauer. Yeah.

Arnold00:42:15

Jack, you've been very gracious with your time with us and I appreciate that. This is an unbelievable book, folks.If you read anything in the next, in this year or next year, this is a book that you must read and you must share with your friends. It would be a great book, a very intense book for a book club, but it would be a very good book for a book club.

Jack00:42:38

And any talk about a movie, I think it would sounds like it would be.

Arnold00:42:41

Oh my gosh, that would be a great movie.

Jack00:42:42

I think it would be fantastic.

Arnold00:42:44

So the book is called the Prosecutor. It's by Jack Fairweather. Jack's going to be speaking at the Jewish Book festival at the St. Louis County Library.Clark family Branch that's on South Lindbergh on December 11th at 7pm you can go to jccstl.com for more information. Jack, we look forward to seeing you there. And what a. Again, what a stupendous book.And thank you for your research and your time that you devoted to getting the information out about Fritz Bauer. And because if it wasn't for him, who knows what our history would be like right. Right now.

Mark00:43:20

Thank you so much for having me. Both. It's been a real pleasure.

Arnold00:43:23

Thank you, sir. Take care.

Jack00:43:24

Yep. Our pleasure. Boy, thank goodness for Jack.

Arnold00:43:28

Oh, my gosh. And for bringing up Fritz. Yeah. To find what's the common denominator here? I know we all think that way. Like, why is this. Like this. Why is this.Like, what's this? All pointing to the same person. Let's know more about that person.

Jack00:43:40

How long is the book? How many pages?

Arnold00:43:42

The book is. Yes, I have it right here. Talk about something else while I pull this up and give you the good answer. Yeah, not just off the. Okay, here we go.The book is 319 pages.

Jack00:43:55

That's not too bad.

Arnold00:43:56

No, but he has over a hundred pages of notes and sources. Like, he. He has really done his research. He. The characters, the. Of all the people that he mentions in there. It's really. Who is this?And you got to keep track. But it's very detailed. But it's a very intriguing. Don't let the size of the book be a detriment to you, because it really flows well.It's like, I can't wait to read the next chapter. It's that kind of a book. And he goes from the beginning of Fritz Bauer's life all the way to the very end. And he. He's interviewed family members.I was going to ask him, did he fly over there? He's done a lot of research. The family gave him information. He's gotten letters.And he's written this previous book that he won the award for, which kind of was almost like a foundational aspect to push him into this.

Jack00:44:46

So when did Fritz Bauer pass away?

Arnold00:44:49

He passed in 1968.

Jack00:44:51

Okay. So he got done with that last trial in the mid-60s, and shortly after that was.

Arnold00:44:57

And he passed away.He had taken at the time, because he was working like 18 hours a day, and he had taken some sleeping pills to sleep, and he was in a bathtub relaxing and had a heart attack. But he was 65 years old, and he died in Frankfurt of a heart attack. But his. There is a movie, the People versus Fritz Bauer. That's in 2015.And then Yesterday Girl, 1966. Not quite sure about that, but this would be an outstanding movie.And Mark, who knew, like, even the term Holocaust was not widely used until this really started to get going after the Auschwitz trial many years later. Yes. Like we all think it's always been around, or no, everybody knew right away.

Jack00:45:47

It all sounds like it all happened at one time, but it didn't. It happened like he was still prosecuting it 20 years after.

Arnold00:45:53

Oh, easily. And attitudes really had not changed Even into the 1990s in West Germany, which is wild.

Jack00:46:01

It is crazy.

Arnold00:46:02

But it tells you a little bit about people and what they want to believe.If you believe something that's been a lie, how do you come to grips with that personally and individually and collectively, as a family or as a society? How do you do that when you believe the lie?

Jack00:46:21

Very heavy, I'm afraid.

Arnold00:46:23

It is very heavy. And because it's very heavy.

Mark00:46:28

Oh, yeah.

Arnold00:46:28

My gosh. I really recommend this book, folks. It's a quick read.

Mark00:46:33

Okay.

Arnold00:46:34

It would be a great book for a book club. And I think because of the heavy topic, maybe we just leave it right there, Mark.

Mark00:46:42

Okay.

Arnold00:46:42

If that's okay with you.

Jack00:46:43

That's fine. I think it's a good idea.

Arnold00:46:46

So, folks, again, the Jewish Book Festival. Jack Fairweather, author of the prosecutor December 11th at 7pm St. Louis County Library, Clark Family Branch. That's 1640 South Lindbergh Boulevard.That's across from Frontenac Plaza. JCCSTL.com for more information and for tickets. You will need tickets for this particular event. So that's all for this show.We thank you for joining us today and listening.If you've enjoyed this episode, you can listen to additional shows@stlintune.com please consider leaving a review on our website, Apple Podcasts, Podchaser or your preferred podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners and continue to grow.I want to thank Bob Berthisel for our theme music, our sponsor, Better Rate Mortgage, our guest, Jack Fairweather and co host Mark Langston. And we thank you listeners for being a part of our community of curious minds.St. Louis in tune is a production of Motif Media Group and the US Radio Network. Remember to keep seeking, keep learning, walk worthy and let your light shine. For St. Louis in tune, I'm Arnold Stricker.