Fritz Cremer was born in Arnsberg an der Ruhr (North Rhine-Westphalia) in 1906. From 1929 to 1934 he studied at the United State Schools of Free and Applied Art in Berlin. In the 1920s he became a member of the German Communist Party. After the war years he taught at the Academy of Applied Art in Vienna and returned to East Berlin in 1950. Important sculptural commissions were the monuments in the con­centration camps Ravensbrück, Mauthausen and Buchenwald, which he created in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1977 he was invited to documenta 6, and in 1992 he received the Stiftung Bremer Sculptor’s Prize. Cremer died in Berlin in 1993.