Once the youngest judge in the Weimar Republic, Fritz Bauer’s career ended abruptly when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Persecuted as both a Jew and a Social Democrat, he was interned in a concentration camp for several months and fled Germany in 1936, first to Denmark and later to Sweden. After the war, the victim of persecution became a prosecutor of Nazi injustice: he returned to Germany in 1949 as Frankfurt’s chief prosecutor to contribute to the reconstruction of democracy. Against the tough resistance of his colleagues, many of whom themselves had been part of the Nazi state apparatus, Bauer opened the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials (1963–1981). They marked a turning point in the approach to Nazi crimes. Fritz Bauer’s courage and determination left an endurable mark on the legal system of the young Federal Republic and the German understanding of democracy. For Bauer, this remained a struggle for the rest of his life in the climate of the 1950s and 1960s: “When I leave my office, I enter enemy territory.”