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Fritz Bauer Institute

On 11 January 1995 – 50 years after the liberation of concentration and extermination camps – the Fritz Bauer Institute was established by the State of Hesse, the City of Frankfurt am Main and the Förderverein Fritz Bauer Institut e.V. as a foundation under civil law based in Frankfurt am Main.

The initiative for this came from Lord Mayor Volker Hauff who, under the impression of his visit to the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem in 1989, initiated the discussion about a Holocaust Centre in the “Land of the Perpetrators”. A planning group was set up and attached to the Department of Culture and Leisure of the City of Frankfurt am Main. Their final report on the “Frankfurt Holocaust Learning and Documentation Centre” was at the same time the concept for the work of the Fritz Bauer Institute. The founding director of the Institute was Dr. Hanno Loewy, who had already headed the office preparing it. He was later followed by the directors Prof. Dr Micha Brumlik (2000-2005), Prof. Dr Dietfrid Krause-Vilmar (acting director, 2005-2007), Prof. Dr Raphael Gross (2007-2015) and Prof. Dr Werner Konitzer (acting director, 2015-2017). On 1 May 2017, Prof. Dr Sybille Steinbacher took over as director of the Fritz Bauer Institute and at the same time holds the newly created chair for research into the history and impact of the Holocaust at the History Department of the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.

After several changes of location (Walter-Kolb-Strasse 9-11, Bockenheimer Landstrasse 104, Rheinstrasse 29), the Institute moved to its current headquarters in the IG Farben-Haus on the Westend Campus of the Goethe University (Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1) in the summer of 2001. With the move into the historically significant building, it was decided within the framework of a cooperation agreement that the Fritz Bauer Institute would become an affiliated institute of the university, while retaining the status of an independent institute, and the Goethe University joined the foundation board as the fourth member.