1HomeLudwigsburgFebruary 1933Fritz Bauer knew the Nazis were watching them from the moment he and his fellow marchers unfurled their flags and stamped through the cold, shuttered streets of Ludwigsburg. It was Sunday, February 26, 1933, a week before an election called by the new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, who was seeking to gain a majority for the Nazi Party in the German parliament, the Reichstag. Bauer and his small band of sixty aging World War I veterans and factory workers had taken to the streets to rally support for the country’s democratic order they had sworn to protect as members of the Reichsbanner militia. Bauer did not know if Hitler would follow through on his threats to overturn the constitution to rid the country of Jews and socialists. But he didn’t doubt that if Hitler won then the Nazis would pursue their enemies, and that he, as a Jewish judge and outspoken critic, was surely one of them.
The twenty-nine-year-old had already come to their attention after being appointed chairman of the Reichsbanner in the state of Württemberg and taking to the smoky auditoriums, men’s clubs, and beer halls of Stuttgart to rally against Hitler. “Bauer,” observed one Nazi informant, “[has] with genuine Jewish impudence agitated against the National Socialist movement at every opportunity. His weapons . . . : hatred, lies, and slander.”
Bauer was certainly an impressive speaker. Away from a stage, he could be shy and diffident, a slim delicate man in a suit that seemed too big for him, his head invariably stuck in a book as he walked down the street dodging lampposts. Indeed when Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the main progressive pary in Stuttgart, the Social Democrats, had first met Bauer he noted the younger man’s law doctorate, soft jawline, and gentle brown eyes and declared: “Workers don’t like intellectuals.” It was true that as the Goethe-quoting scion of a wealthy Jewish family and secretly gay, Bauer was a potential liability to the parties’ working-class base. But Schumacher had been impressed by Bauer’s quiet charisma and subtle gift for recognizing vulnerability in others. And when placed before a crowd, Bauer grew fierce and impassioned; his transformation onstage was so surprising, recalled one contemporary, that his words felt like a jolt of electricity.
Bauer sensed his men’s unease as he led them past the prim, swastika-lined shop windows in Ludwigsburg. Nazi spies were likely already watching them, noting down who was there and what was said. He roused his men as best he could at rallies in the working class districts of Pflugfelden, Eglosheim, Hoheneck, and finally Ossweil, where they chanted “Hail Freedom” and their breath rose in a cloud in the chill evening air. Defending the Weimar Republic, Bauer believed, was worth the risk. The republic’s constitution, established in the aftermath of World War I, had granted universal suffrage and rights to freedom of expression and assembly. Workers had gained protection for the eight-hour day and and better access to healthcare, while the country’s gay rights movement was openly calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality.
Yet the republic’s darker side was never far from Bauer’s mind. As a Jewish in Munich in the early 1920s, he’d been barred from joining most fraternities. He’d watched his right-wing classmates flock to Hitler’s beer hall speeches and then spill out onto the streets looking for socialists and Jews to beat up. These experiences had pushed Bauer to find his political voice, first by rallying students on campus to embrace a “tolerant way of life” and then by joining the Social Democratic Party, which had led several governments during the early years of the republic, and volunteering for the Reichsbanner.
Night fell and the marchers made their way back through Nazi territory toward Ludwigsburg train station. Bauer registered the police as they passed the market square. Then he heard an angry cry and suddenly a red-faced, slick-haired gang was upon them—Brownshirts, Hitler’s paramilitary. Bauer was caught in a flailing press of bodies as the Nazis beat the Reichsbanner down the hill to the station, where the police finally blew their whistles to intervene.
The next morning, a Monday, back in Stuttgart, Bauer shaved, brushed his hair, and got ready for court. He was lucky that he bore no marks from the confrontation, but that seemed a minor concern as he considered what would happen if the Nazis won the election. Was he prepared to keep fighting or even go to jail for his beliefs? His thoughts turned uncomfortably to the reasons why the Nazis would come for him. He didn’t think they knew he was gay, a secret he had shared with only a few friends, although he couldn’t be sure; the police regularly surveilled popular hookup spots in parks and public urinals. His activism certainly wasn’t a secret, but neither was it a crime—at least not yet.
Bauer still lived at home with his parents in their generous apartment on Wiederholdstrasse and kept his activism from them for their safety but also because his father, Ludwig, did not appreciate his son’s socialist convictions. Ludwig was a short man with a thrusting jaw, clipped mustache, and beady eyes who at age forty-five had volunteered for the frontlines of the Great War. He was proud of the way Jews like himself had fought for Germany and made sure to pass on his faith in the fatherland and belief in duty and obedience to Bauer and his younger sister Margot. As a child Bauer had sat in dread at the dining room table, awaiting a thrashing for some transgression—a hand moving too soon or a word spoken out of turn. Ludwig, now sixty-three disliked Hitler’s crude talk about the Volk and racial purity, and was offended by the Nazis’ refusal to acknowledge the sacrifices of Jewish soldiers. But he was skeptical of democracy—at least the Weimar kind—which he felt was an imposition of the Allies and thoroughly un-German. Like many Jews he was confident that Hitler’s antisemitic fervor would pass and broadly agreed with the Nazis’ plans to deal with political factionalism, violence on the streets, and the millions left unemployed by the Depression.
Ludwig’s values reflected the politics of an earlier generation that had come of age following German unification in 1871. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had imposed an authoritarian style of government on an otherwise fractious array of German states and princely holdings and promoted the German language and culture as a unifying force. Jews were granted full legal equality, and families like the Bauers took advantage of rapid industrialization and the emergence of a mass society to grow their businesses. For Ludwig, Hitler’s promise to restore the Reich was appealing.
Bauer was close to his mother, Ella, eleven years Ludwig’s junior, a quietly determined woman who comforted young Fritz after her husband’s rages. Ella came from a family of rabbis in Tübingen and while she had allowed Ludwig’s secular views to prevail, her spiritualism filled the household. The family were members of the local synagogue and observed Passover and other high holidays; Bauer spoke regularly at a liberal Jewish organization and was treasurer of its youth group. Bauer felt that Ella trusted his judgment, and he shared with her most things, even his homosexuality. He often found Ella in the kitchen in the mornings with coffee ready, which he took with a cigarette by way of breakfast. Then he was off to work down the hill, past the family’s textile business on Seestrasse, and across Kriegsbergstrasse, the city’s main thoroughfare, to the Schlossgarten, an elegant park lined with poplars and plane trees.
Stuttgart was the largest city in southwest Germany, provincial compared to Berlin, but no less transformed by the forces of modernity. The city had erected its first skyscraper, the sixteen-story Tagblatt Tower, with a high-speed elevator and viewing gallery where visitors could admire the panorama: the half-timbered buildings of the old town; the grand city hall, the gleaming glass edifice of the Jewish-owned Schocken department store and the low hills on all sides, topped with vineyards and forests where Bauer liked to hike. Those who could afford distractions filled the cafés and restaurants under the linden trees or “briskly jazzed” at the Regina and Residenz Cafés.
Most of Bauer’s colleagues in the staid sandstone courthouse on Archivstrasse were older than him and deeply conservative. Several of his superiors supported Nazism and as Hitler rose to prominence they had sought to push Bauer out. Two years earlier, someone had leaked a story to the NS-Kurier, the local Nazi newspaper, that Bauer had passed on court details to a left-wing journalist. This in itself was not illegal, but the NS-Kurier had seized on the case as an example of perfidious Jewish infiltration of the judiciary. Bauer sued for libel and won, but he was still demoted to the civil courts and limited to handling minor offenses. He could have joined a lucrative private practice, but he felt that even in a lesser role inside the court he still had more value to the Left as a source of intelligence and counsel to activists targeted by the police.
Copyright © 2025 by Jack Fairweather. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
