De-nazification of the (West) German Federal Republic took a long time. One  who never stopped prosecuting old Nazis was the Hessian state attorney Fritz Bauer (1903–68). His achievements and defeats have now been competently chronicled. Bauer was a social democratic judge who fled the Nazis and spent the war in Sweden. As a homosexual he also saw his court proceedings against old Nazis as part of a wider attempt to make the Federal Republic more tolerant and liberal. He  started by showing that criminal oaths were never legitimate. This was important because most of the Nazis referred to their oaths of allegiance to Hitler when they claimed superior order defence in the courts. In 1951 he succeeded in sentencing Ernst Otto Remer, chairman and founder of neo-Nazi Deutsche Reichspartei. Remer accused the men behind the 20th of July attempt to kill Hitler of treason. He was convicted, since the court agreed with Bauer that orders that were clearly criminal did not require obedience. Bauer’s crowning achievement came in 1964 when he opened the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt against first and foremost Robert Mulka, the deputy commander of the camp. Bauer met with stiff resistance from the German public who wanted a curtain of silence over Nazi atrocities. Another obstacle was the presence of old Nazi judges on the bench, people who had a lot to conceal in their past. But Bauer won the case: Five were found guilty and sentenced to life. Mulka, to Bauer’s chagrin, was only found guilty of accessory to murder. He got 14 years. Bauer succeeded, however, in showing that complicity in Nazi murders went deep in Germany.