LUDWIGSBURG, Germany (Reuters) - Germany's chief Nazi prosecutor
is now more likely to be consoling the grandchild of a war
criminal than chasing Adolf Hitler's murderous henchmen.
More than 60 years after World War Two ended, Nazi hunters
are running out of targets and increasingly becoming historians
who shine a harsh light on dark family secrets.
"It's hard to keep prosecutors here," said Kurt
Schrimm, who leads Germany's department for prosecuting
Nazi war crimes.
"I tell them when they start that the prospects of
prosecution are slim. The suspects are getting older. It's
more about finding out and explaining what happened."
For many Germans, the search for Nazis in their family
ends in the small western town of Ludwigsburg.
Hundreds of thousands of index cards fill the cellar of
the former prison. Each card carries a name and often a
list of war-crime prosecutions. A librarian leafs through
the indexes, looking for names put forward by callers researching
family members they may have never known.
For Schrimm, the face of one such bewildered teenager
is as vivid a memory as that of her grandfather, Josef
Schwammberger -- the "most brutal Nazi" he ever
put behind bars.
The Austrian's purges in a Polish ghetto included shooting
40 children in an orphanage and offering a false amnesty
to Jews living underground only to order them stripped
and executed.
After paying 500,000 Deutsch Marks to an informant, Schrimm
traced Schwammberger to Argentina which extradited him
in 1987.
In his initial interviews, Schwammberger appeared to be
a gentle, grandfatherly figure. He told Schrimm he had
turned to "the Pope" for help in escaping the
advancing allied forces.
Over the course of his trial, he emerged as a sadist who
once encouraged his dog to maul a man to death.
During the hearings, Schrimm received a visit from a 17-year-old
girl: "His granddaughter had read it in the newspapers
and wanted to know first hand if it was true," Schrimm
recalls. "She was totally shaken."
Correcting history has also become an important part of
Eli Rosenbaum's work.
Head of the U.S. Office of Special Investigations, Rosenbaum
has unmasked Nazis who settled inconspicuously into suburban
America as well as knocking prominent citizens off their
pedestals.
When Rosenbaum discovered Arthur Rudolph around 1980,
the architect of the Saturn V rocket that put man on the
moon was one of America's most celebrated adopted sons.
UNDERGROUND CHAMBERS
But during the war, Rudolph had managed a "hell-like" underground
factory in Germany where slave workers built the V2 rocket,
Rosenbaum says. Prisoners were tortured, killed and, on
one occasion, forced to watch a mass hanging of inmates.
After the war, Rudolph and others were hired by the U.S.
military and brought to their new home under a secret programme
called Project Paperclip, formerly known as Operation Overcast.
In German archives, Rosenbaum discovered a report signed
by Rudolph describing a visit to an aircraft factory using
forced labor. "He writes that this is great from the
security perspective and recommends they use camp inmates
to build the
V2."
Disgraced, Rudolph surrendered his U.S. citizenship and
returned to Germany.
"I remember he died on New Year's day," says
Rosenbaum. "He spent many years trying to rehabilitate
his name.
"We had rewritten history. Very few people knew about
that aspect of the German V2 programme."
"At the air and space museum (in Washington), they
have a V2 missile. I remember going to see it when I was
investigating Rudolph and there was nothing that indicated
how this thing was made. After the case, they changed the
display."
Bringing war criminals to justice is getting ever tougher
but Schrimm rebuts criticism from Nazi-hunting institution
the Simon Wiesenthal Centre that convictions are too low.
"The results are bad and they are going to get worse," he
says. "They will have more cause for disappointment
next year.
"But that is no reflection of our competence or willingness.
I can't pull witnesses out of a hat."
Setting history straight, however, offers some compensation.
Schrimm recalls a meeting with a frail Jewish woman he
visited in New York who had lost her family to Schwammberger's
executioners.
"'I've told the story to my children and my grandchildren,'
she said. 'I've waited 45 years for someone from Germany
to express an interest in hearing it.
"Now that you have come, I can die in peace."'
(Editing by Robert Woodward)
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