The Prosecutor review: ‘the Jew who put his country on trial’

But after the war, Bauer returned to what was becoming West Germany. He was driven, Fairweather tells us, by a need to see justice done.

He shows that Nuremberg was a lacklustre event that left many dyed-in-the-wool Nazis free and clear

This book busts open the myth of the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust in Germany as one of collective moral reckoning. Rather, it shows through three great judicial occasions, two of which Bauer helped shape, a divided country desperate to repel the threat of communism and equally determined to bury the past.

Rather than hold Nazis to account, it instead reintegrated untold numbers into civil society and, most importantly into public life in areas such as politics and the judiciary.

The first occasion was the immediate post-war Nuremberg Trials.

Far from conclusively condemning the Nazi regime, Fairweather shows us that, in fact, Nuremberg was a lacklustre and disappointing event that left many dyed-in-the-wool Nazis free and clear. And it left Bauer, who had had no involvement in the trials, with a bitter taste.

The second case was 15 years after Nuremberg, the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. As Fairweather thrillingly reveals, Bauer, after an extraordinary tip-off, was central to informing the Israelis of Eichmann’s whereabouts in Argentina. Even so, there were nearly two years of delay while Israel shilly-shallied over-capturing him and putting him on trial. We learn of dubious deals between Israel’s David Ben-Gurion and Germany’s Konrad Adenauer, some known, some well-hidden, and of Bauer’s own frustration and visits to Israel to try to push Mossad chief Isser Harel into making a move.

As we know, Eichmann was indeed finally caught, smuggled to Israel after being disguised by Mossad as an El Al steward, and put on trial. It was an international occasion covered by hundreds of reporters, and which prompted Hannah Arendt to coin the phrase “the banality of evil”. It also prompted the Israeli prosecutor Gideon Hausner to declaim: “With me in this place, and at this hour, stand six million accusers… their blood cries out, but their voices are not heard. Therefore, it falls to me to be their spokesman.”

And the last case? Well, shamefully I had no knowledge whatsoever of Bauer’s last major trial, in which he and his team in 1963 painstakingly assembled – as far as was possible – a case against 25 defendants, many of them “pillars of the community”, on charges relating to their involvement in Auschwitz. It is an account almost impossible to read without weeping, as Fairweather describes how so many of these men “had returned to the jobs they had done prior to joining the SS or had found respectable employment elsewhere. The camp adjutant Robert Mulka had his lucrative glass export business. The SS doctor Franz Lucas ran the obstetrics and gynaecology department of a hospital. The gas chamber operative was a lecturer at the Cologne Chamber of Agriculture”. Banality of evil, indeed.

Bauer himself did not take part prosecuting at this trial, preferring to leave the questioning to lawyers who were too young to have been caught up in the Nazi horror themselves. The court even paid an unprecedented visit to the ruins of Auschwitz. The Prosecutor is a monumental work, characterised by Fairweather’s fingertip research, not least in the details of ordinary German complicity in genocide. He offers lessons we all need to learn.

The Prosecutor by Jack Fairweather

WH Allen, £22