Films bring struggle of 'hated' German Nazi hunter to life

With two new films, German cinema has rediscovered the country's fiercest Nazi hunter, former prosecutor Fritz Bauer, honoring a man who fought against postwar amnesia about the Holocaust.

A Jewish atheist and Social Democrat who spent time in a Nazi concentration camp before going into wartime exile, Bauer became "the most hated lawyer in Germany" after World War II, one of his biographers, Ronen Steinke, said.

Honoring him on the big screen with the stories of his two biggest battles places him "finally back where he belongs: in the collective consciousness", said Munich daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.