November 2026: Fritz Bauer
Stumbling Stones in Chemnitz
Fritz Bauer
Heinrich Moritz Frank, Rosa Frank, Leonore Frank and Erwin Konrad Frank
Fritz Bauer
Born: 3 April 1894
Died: 25 February 1942
Installation location:
19 Josephinenstraße
Stolperstein laying on:
5 November 2026
Life Path
To the Nazis, homosexuals were ‘pests of the people’. The number of homosexual concentration camp prisoners was around 10,000. Their mortality rate is estimated at between 50 and 60 per cent. This makes them one of the groups of prisoners persecuted on non-racial grounds with the highest mortality rates in the concentration camps.
Fritz Bauer, who came from Frohnau in the Ore Mountains, was one of these victims. He was the son of Karl Bauer and Christiane Wilhelmine Zienert. They raised their son in the Protestant faith. His parents later moved to Buchholz in Saxony.
Fritz Bauer worked as a waiter. He married, but the marriage later ended in divorce. His wife’s name is not recorded. Bauer last lived in Chemnitz. He had found a small flat or a room on the fourth floor of the tenement block at 19 Josephinenstraße.
It is not known whether Bauer’s persecution on account of homosexual relationships began before 1933. What is known is that he was arrested on several occasions. An initial entry in the prisoner register of the Leipzig police prison shows that Bauer was admitted on 4 February 1941 and transferred to the Rötha court prison near Leipzig the very next day. On 2 September 1941, he was once again held at the Leipzig police prison. The reason given for his admission was ‘collective transport’. The following day, he was transferred, along with other prisoners, to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where the camp administration classified him as ‘B.V. 175’ (habitual criminal) and he was given prisoner number 39,348.
On 19 September 1941, Bauer was admitted to the infirmary; from there, he was transferred to prisoner block 14 on 24 November 1941. Bauer subsequently fell ill with ‘croupous pneumonia’. A decision was made not to transfer him back to the infirmary, which ultimately led to his agonising death on the morning of 25 February
1942. The authorities cited ‘heart failure’ as the euphemistic official cause of death. His remains were cremated. The urn, bearing the serial number 4384, was interred at the Wilmersdorf Waldfriedhof Güterfelde (now in the Potsdam-Mittelmark district).
Stumbling Stones in Chemnitz
It is a project against forgetting: stumbling stones have been laid in Chemnitz every year since 2007.
Embedded in the pavement, the memorial stones commemorate the tragic fates of fellow citizens who were persecuted, deported, murdered or driven to their deaths during the National Socialist regime.
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