Philipp Auerbach

Philipp Auerbach was a survivor of the Holocaust. Auerbach was appointed state commissioner for racially, religiously and politically persecuted people in Bavaria by the US occupation authorities in 1946. He was primarily responsible for the German reparation policy for Jewish victims of the Nazi regime. He was also a member of the first board of directors of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. He carried out his duties with great commitment. Although he acted correctly, he ran into conflicts with the Bavarian state government. Justice Minister Josef Müller, with the help of the public prosecutor's office, constructed a criminal case against Auerbach because of Auerbach's alleged multiple misconduct, had him arrested on the motorway in 1951 and removed him from office. In the trial that followed with clearly anti-Semitic undertones - it was the first trial in Germany against a prominent Jew after the Holocaust and Germany's defeat in the Second World War - Auerbach was, according to today's perspective, acquitted of the main charges in 1952, but the judges handed down a particularly harsh sentence of two and a half years in prison for infidelity and fraud. The night after the conviction, the essentially innocent Auerbach committed suicide; In 1954 he was rehabilitated by an investigative committee of the Bavarian state parliament.