Fritz Bauer Quotes

According to the website of the libertarian Cato Institute, “A frequent lament amongst libertarians is the number of talented individuals who never received the prize. Fritz Machlup, for example, was a leading theorist in the pure theory of international trade. Ludwig von Mises was one of the most pioneering economists of the twentieth century. Lord P. T. Bauer contributed vast scholarship to the literature of development economics. Gordon Tullock, Buchanan's partner in the creation of Public Choice, has done pioneering work in the field of rent seeking.

In 1958 Fritz Bauer, an ex-lawyer imprisoned by the Nazis, was appointed Attorney General in the state of Hesse and decided to bring the camp commandant and a number of SS guards to face justice in Germany. But he was up against a conspiracy of silence within sections of the post-war administration and the collective amnesia of the general population. The crimes committed at Auschwitz were perpetrated in Poland outside the jurisdiction of German courts, so the federal court had to be convinced that the interests of justice would be served by authorizing the regional court of Hesse to indict the accused. The defendants would seek to evade personal responsibility by claiming they were soldiers acting under orders and the testimony of surviving witnesses was assumed to be unreliable after 20 years. Furthermore, German law required irrefutable evidence of murder. Mere cruelty was not considered to be a serious enough offence. Eight thousand SS men had served at the camp from May 1940 to its liberation in January 1945 and identifying those who had committed individual acts of murder was thought to be practically impossible. They had melted into the community, leaving Bauer and his small team of young, idealistic lawyers (Georg Friedrich Vogel, Joachim Kugler and Gerhard Wiese) to track them down.