Claus Mueller

As a recipient of the German equivalent of the Oscar, The Lola, and several other top awards, Lars Kraume’s fact based feature film documents the investigative work of Bauer as the attorney general, who tracked down Adolf Eichmann overcoming all obstacles that German society posed in the 1950s. Bauer was appointed state attorney general in 1956 by the Governor of Hessen, Georg August Zinn, who had struggled with Bauer against the Nazi regime. Bauer was a Jewish lawyer and that pursued his mission of identifying and bringing to justice Nazi criminals at all costs.  During the post war period many important key corporate, political and civil service positions, specifically in the judicial sector, were occupied by former Nazis who had no interest in the review of their past or supporting the prosecution of individuals for crimes committed during the Third Reich, a perspective shared by most of the German population.  There was an effective wall of silence protecting Third Reich criminals. As the film shows, Bauer’s pursuit was openly and covertly opposed by many of his colleagues with only a few sharing his goals.  Their resistance to his prosecutorial efforts included the consideration of blackmailing Bauer’s with evidence of his homosexual encounters in Denmark, redefining an accident he had as a failed suicide attempt to show he was unfit for service, the disappearing of files, as well as the obstruction and slowdown of work. As Bauer observed, any time he left his office he entered enemy territory. When his emphasis on the need for the prosecution of the crimes committed during the Third Reich, and the need for a democratic system of justice became public through television interviews he received numerous death threats. The prevailing legal consideration of that period made effective prosecution of criminal behavior during the Third Reich difficult because personal responsibility had to be proven through witness accounts.  A recent German court decision ruled that service in a concentration camp is sufficient for prosecution and that there is no need for a proof of an individual crime.

In 1957, Fritz Bauer received a letter from Lothar Herrmann, a Jewish survivor of the camps from Argentine, that informed him that Eichmann was living in Buenos Aires under a false name. Herrmann explained that his daughter had fallen in love with Nick Eichmann who was boasting about his father’s war crimes. Bauer chose not to share this critical information with German agencies. Interpol staff advised him that they did not handle political crimes. His refusal to advise German authorities made perfect sense. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s chief of staff at that time was Hans Globke who was in charge of security, including supervision of the German intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). During the Third Reich he was a senior civil servant, a legal adviser in the Office for Jewish affairs, a department headed by Adolf Eichmann. He also co-authored the commentary to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripping German Jews of their German citizenship, and forcing them to add to the surname Sara or Israel if they had non-Jewish sounding first names. Thus Peter Baum was altered to Israel Peter Baum which facilitated subsequent identification of being Jewish.  At the Nuremberg trials Globke admitted that he had knowledge of the mass murder of Jews.

The BND headed by Arnold Gehlen was at that time the most important German intelligence service and had a staff drawn primarily during the first decade after the war from the SS, Gestapo, SD (security services), the Canaris service, and the Wehrmacht. Numerous staff members were recruited through Globke’s office and privately often did not hide their past. It has been estimated that up to the late fifties about half of the BND employees had a questionable past. In the early sixties, as prompted by the Eichmann trial and the 1961 arrest for treason of Heinz Felfe, a senior BND official and former Third Reich SD officer, the German Intelligence Service started investigating its own staff for its work for the Third Reich.

Fritz Bauer decided to contact the Mossad and advised them of Eichmann’s whereabouts. He was warned by Governor Zinn and Karl Angermann, a young attorney from his staff, that passing information to a foreign intelligence service like the Mossad was tantamount to treason. Bauer went ahead against their advice and left for a brief trip to Israel where he learned that the Mossad required independent verification of Eichmann’s residence before any action could be taken. With the help of Angermann he secured the proof, an audio recording of Eichmann made in Buenos Aires by Willem Sassen and also ascertained that Eichmann had been a department head on the payroll of Mercedes Benz in Argentina under the pseudonym Ricardo Clement. That name was listed on the electricity bill for the house where Eichmann was living. Bauer returned to Israel with the new evidence and was assured by Israel’s attorney general that if Eichmann were to be found his trial would take place in Germany. To mislead German intelligence, Bauer went back to Germany and held a press conference announcing that Eichmann has been located in Kuwait and that an extradition request has been filed.  Several days later on May 11, 1960 Eichmann was captured by the Mossad in Buenos Aires and transferred to Israel and placed on trial in April 1961.

Fritz Bauer was stunned upon learning from Governor Zinn that an official understanding has been reached between Germany and Israel that the Eichmann trial would be held in Jerusalem. For Bauer, the driving force behind finding Eichmann was to bring him to justice in Germany with the goal of unmasking other Nazi war criminals. Despite his inability to reach his desired outcome with Eichmann, Bauer was not deterred from tracking down other war criminals. Bauer held the first Auschwitz process in Germany in 1963.  He broke the wall of silence and confronted the German public with the war time crimes committed by common Germans in the concentration camps. Fritz Bauer died in 1968 and it took several years before his role in identifying Eichmann’s location was revealed.

The People Against Fritz Bauer does not cover the reasons the Eichmann trial was held in Jerusalem, a decision which met the interests of both countries. Israel gained an international platform for generating support for the country, and provided uncontestable evidence of the mass murder and killing machine Eichmann was responsible for. By restricting the trial in Israel to Eichmann’s role in the extermination process, Bauer’s goal of generating evidence against other German senior officials serving the Nazi dictatorship was not met.  Thus Globke as well as Gehlen and his BND, the federal intelligence service were not threatened at all, a relief for the German government. Widespread discovery of Nazi criminals in public and private position could have threatened Germany’s political stability, a view shared by US officials given the rising cold war threats. When Eichmann’s defense council requested that Globke be interviewed, the Jerusalem court refused the request.  A pending request by Israel for a large loan of money from Germany  for the acquisition of arms may also have helped keep the trial limited to what was relevant to Eichmann. The credit was approved by Adenauer in August 1962. Ironically, Globke who was in charge of a committee to define Eichmann policy, met Israeli representatives during the Eichmann trial to discuss the arms deal. German politicians strongly supported Israel but not the investigation of its officials who were tainted by a Nazi past. As Adenauer’s secretary of defense Franz Josef Strauss put it, “[Germany] should not be held   collectively responsible for the crimes of past generations in the context of the Eichmann trials”. Globke was forced to resign in 1963 but was never held accountable for his service to the Third Reich facilitating the holocaust.

Compared to other features like Labyrinth of Lies covering Germany’s reckoning with its troubled past Lars Krume’s documentary style portrait of Fritz Bauer and his protagonists is a superbly enacted film providing clear and compelling insights into the sociopolitical context of Adolf Eichmann’s capture and the resistance against investigating and prosecuting prominent individuals for their activities during the Third Reich.

Claus Mueller     filmexchange@gmail.com