Hardly any other major German city embraced Nazi ideology as quickly and thoroughly as Frankfurt. Under Mayor Friedrich Krebs, Frankfurt was intended to become a showcase city for National Socialism. Several institutions of the City of Frankfurt have created a commemorative platform on this topic, bringing together reliable sources to encourage active engagement with this period of history. The terror of Germany’s aggressive war, which claimed 50 million lives, led to the bombing of German cities by Allied forces.
The attack on Frankfurt on March 22, 1944, almost completely destroyed the core of the Old Town. After the Second World War, only a few buildings were rebuilt, including the Römer, Frankfurt’s city hall.
After the war, it was especially the Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer (1903–1968) who, as one of the few jurists, pursued the crimes of the National Socialists and initiated the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials. These began on December 20, 1963, in the Römer and were continued from April 1964 onward in the Saalbau Gallus.
Fritz Bauer (1903–1968) was a Jewish German jurist who became politically active at a young age. Dismissed from the judicial service by the National Socialists in 1933 and imprisoned for several months in the Heuberg concentration camp, he fled to Scandinavia in 1936. The SPD party chairman Kurt Schumacher supported his return to Germany in 1949. From 1956 until his death, he served as Attorney General of the State of Hesse in Frankfurt am Main. In this role, Bauer significantly advanced the legal prosecution of National Socialist crimes and is regarded as a central figure in the history of West Germany’s pursuit of justice for Nazi atrocities.
After the National Socialists seized power in early 1933, they sought to control culture, the media, and academia. Books by authors who did not fit into their ideological system were to disappear from libraries and public life. As part of a nationwide campaign, thousands of books were publicly burned in Frankfurt as well, on what was then the Opernplatz.
