The Prosecutor – How one gay man brought the Nazis to Justice | A Conversation with author Jack Fairweather
A story of courageous leadership in the face of massive societal challenges - Pride in Leadership will speak to renowned author and writer Jack Fairweather about his new book, The Prosecutor.
Pride in Leadership will speak to renowned author and writer Jack Fairweather about his new book, The Prosecutor, in this one-of-a-kind online event.
Event details
- Wednesday 4 March
- 11am – noon
- Online
- Book your place now
Imagine a history of the twentieth century in which the Holocaust is only a footnote to the Second World War. Where the encyclopaedia entry for Auschwitz describes the flourishing chemical industry in the nearby town but omits the gas chambers. Where School textbooks describe Hitler as “gifted in a variety of ways” and conclude that “no more than a hundred people knew about it.” 
This isn’t an abstract thought experiment. This was West Germany in the years following Hitler’s defeat, when the Holocaust was all but forgotten and the Allies sanctioned the return of millions of former Nazis to forge a new country to serve as a bulwark against Communism. It was time, in the words of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1949, to “let bygones be bygones.”
From the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of The Volunteer, the powerful true story of a Jewish lawyer who returned to Germany after World War II to prosecute war crimes, only to find himself pitted against a nation determined to bury the past.
At the end of the Nuremberg trial in 1946, some of the greatest war criminals in history were sentenced to death, but hundreds of thousands of Nazi murderers and collaborators remained at large. The Allies were ready to overlook their pasts as the Cold War began, and the horrors of the Holocaust were in danger of being forgotten.
In The Prosecutor, Jack Fairweather brings to life the remarkable story of Fritz Bauer, a gay, Jewish judge from Stuttgart who survived the Nazis and made it his mission to force his countrymen to confront their complicity in the genocide. In this deeply researched book, Fairweather draws on unpublished family papers, newly declassified German records, and exclusive interviews to immerse readers in the shadowy, unfamiliar world of postwar West Germany where those who implemented genocide run the country, the CIA is funding Hitler’s former spy-ring in the east, and Nazi-era anti-gay laws are strictly enforced. But once Bauer landed on the trail of Adolf Eichmann, he wouldn’t be intimidated. His journey took him deep into the dark heart of West Germany, where his fight for justice would set him against his own government and a network of former Nazis and spies bent on silencing him.
In a time when the history of the Holocaust is taken for granted, The Prosecutor reveals the courtroom battles that were fought to establish its legacy and the personal cost of speaking out. The result is a searing portrait of a nation emerging from the ruins of fascism and one man’s courage in forcing his people––and the world––to face the truth.
Jack Fairweather is the author of the Costa Book Award-winner The Volunteer, a #1 bestseller in the UK that’s been hailed as a modern classic and compared to Schindler’s List. He served as a correspondent for The Washington Post and the Daily Telegraph, where he was the paper’s Baghdad and Persian Gulf bureau chief.
