The People vs. Fritz Bauer

West Germany, 1957. The attorney general Fritz Bauer learns that Adolf Eichmann is living in Argentina. The problem is not finding him but being unable to trust the German state. Former Nazis still hold posts in the judiciary and the intelligence services, and Bauer believes that if the information is shared Eichmann will be warned. So he passes it to Israeli intelligence, which under German law could be treated as treason. Lars Kraume directs. Burghart Klaußner plays Bauer. The subject is not war crimes but the postwar. How long Germany deferred any reckoning with its own past, and how that deferral was protected institutionally. Bauer is drawn not as a hero but as an official left alone inside his own state. There is a second pressure. Bauer was homosexual, and paragraph 175, then still in force, made that a crime. The film keeps that threat visible: the people who want him silenced hold something they can use. It won best film and several other prizes at the German Film Awards in 2016. Bauer's work also led to the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials; he was the man who began them in Germany. Who it is for: viewers interested in postwar German history and political drama built on a real file. Who it is not for: there is no action, it plays almost entirely in offices and meetings, and it is dense if you do not know the political structure of the period.