The Home Office and the police are investigating claims that more than 200 Nazi war criminals are living in Britain, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. The alleged suspects include 75 Auschwitz camp guards who went missing after the Second World War and who are believed to have fled to this country.

The Metropolitan police have been passed details by the Home Office of "several hundred" members of the SS Galician division, which has been blamed for numerous humanitarian atrocities and who may be alive in Britain. They also have the names of the Auschwitz guards which were uncovered by an amateur historian. Dr Stephen Ankier stumbled across the names while researching what happened to family members during the Second World War.

It is understood that some of the suspects from the SS Galician division, also known as the 14th Waffen-SS and largely made up of Ukrainians, may only have been teenagers, too young and too lowly to have been included on official military lists.

This fresh investigation was revealed by Tony McNulty, the immigration minister, in a parliamentary answer. The British government has been criticised in the past for failing to ensure that Second World War crime suspects were brought to justice. Only one man, Anthony Sawoniuk, has been prosecuted in this country for Nazi war crimes. Found guilty in 1999 at the Old Bailey of murdering 18 Jews and now in his eighties, he is serving two life sentences.

Both the Jewish human rights organisation, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, and the former USSR passed on lists of suspects to the British government, but in 1999 the Metropolitan Police War Crimes Unit said that all its lines of inquiry had been exhausted and that the unit was being disbanded.

Inquiries are now dealt with by the Crimes Against Humanity Unit, part of the anti-terror squad. Andrew Dismore MP, who passed the Met details of the Auschwitz guards, called for the hunt for alleged Nazi war criminals to be funded before it is too late.

The Labour MP for Hendon said: "These people should never be allowed to sleep easy in their beds."