The highest award from the state of Hesse for Fritz Bauer?

That was completely unthinkable during the lifetime of the Hessian Attorney General, who, among other things, initiated the Auschwitz trial against former members and leaders of the SS guards at the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp.

Not even the Hessian Prime Minister Georg-August Zinn (SPD), who had appointed Bauer to his office in 1956 and was one of Bauer's really close political friends, could have dared to attack the most hated lawyer in Germany at the time with the Prime Minister's statement in 1964 to honor the donated Wilhelm Leuschner Medal.

54 years after Bauer's death on July 1, 1968 in Frankfurt, another Prime Minister of Hesse has now made up for it.

In the ballroom of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University on the Westend campus, Boris Rhein (CDU) presented this award posthumously and presented the certificate in front of around 400 high-ranking guests, including the former Prime Ministers Hans Eichel (SPD) and Volker Bouffier (CDU). and a medal to his grandnieces Marit Tiefenthal and Pernilla Öhman.

"Uncle Fritz, you are a hero," Tiefenthal said in her words of thanks.

Fritz Bauer was not only quarrelsome in office, but also privately, as Tiefenthal recalled: There were often heated discussions at family celebrations.

Bauer pushed through the Auschwitz trial against strong resistance.

What he and his comrades-in-arms wanted to say with this trial, he clarified in a recorded historical television recording, is the fact that there is a limit in life where one is no longer allowed to participate.

All ethics and every law are based on saying no to inhumanity.

"Without Fritz Bauer, our history would not be what it is"

Above all, Bauer wanted to hold up a mirror to the Germans and confront them with the monstrosity of the atrocities that had been committed in their name during the Holocaust.

In his speech, Rhein quoted Bauer as saying that not only 22 defendants, but 22 million Germans were tried in this trial.

According to Rhein, he raised the question of the country's Nazi past with a sharpness that many at the time went too far - including his party, the CDU.

Not only the CDU has changed in the decades that followed, the whole of society has gradually turned away from suppression and forgetting in the past decades, had to turn away.

Prime Minister Rhein also described the Auschwitz trial as a turning point.

"Without Fritz Bauer, our history would not be what it is today."

Since the 1990s, Bauer and his legacy have been remembered in Germany.

In 1995, for example, the Fritz Bauer Institute was founded in the Main metropolis, which has since set itself the task of researching the history and effects of the Holocaust.

Anyone who cares about Bauer's values ​​can support the institute by becoming a member of its association.

Against obedience to authority and authoritarian thinking

Rhein himself promoted the discussion of the Nazi past when he was Minister of Science, for example by installing a Holocaust professorship at Frankfurt University.

Germany, he said yesterday, would be a different country without Fritz Bauer and the Auschwitz trial, a country in which he did not want to live.

In his opinion, Bauer's basic ethical attitude and his work in the service of humanity have permanently changed society in this country and shaped its political culture: "This achievement should serve as a compass and orientation for us." For example, when it comes to Russia's illegal attack on Ukraine .

Or about the attacks by extremists against a free society.

"We must have courageous and passionate debates with the enemies of democracy," appealed the Prime Minister at the end of his speech.

What else does Fritz Bauer have to say to us today?

According to Sybille Steinbacher, the director of the Fritz Bauer Institute, his condemnation of authoritarian thinking and obeying authorities, his insistence on moral courage and taking responsibility for the present are still demands that are relevant to the younger generation.