Research and Teaching

Plans to assassinate Fritz Bauer. Danger from the Extreme Right

Researchers: Dr. Katharina Rauschenberger, Dr. Niklas Krawinkel, Johannes Beermann-Schön M.A., M.A.

Starting with two specific assassination attempts planned against Attorney General Fritz Bauer in the 1960s, the project aims to explore the environment of the right-wing terrorists involved. What the police and the public prosecutor liked to dismiss as an »isolated act« in the early 1960s already then had ideological and organizational links to several National Socialist and neo-Nazi groups. The aim of the research project is to investigate the two cases and their wider context.

Special emphasis is placed on the threat posed in Hesse by extreme right-wing groups, against the backdrop of which Bauer acted as Hesse’s Attorney General and to which he responded early on.

Contrary to the widespread view that graffiti on public buildings and cemeteries were minor offences, Bauer took them very seriously and saw them as a threat to the constitutional democracy.