Ninety-five-year-old Oskar Gröning, the ‘Bookkeeper of Auschwitz,’ could be one of the last men to stand trial for allegedly participating in the Holocaust .

In the basement of a former women’s prison, a handful of librarians move quietly around a grey cabinet-lined room – with only the sound of sliding draws breaking the silence and soft administrative chatter.

Roughly 1.7 million yellow typeset index cards are stored within this room. Some with only scant information – a name with a date of birth or location – others are filled to the edges with mismatched fonts like a demonstration of the evolution of 20th century typography.

Jens Rommel, a softly-spoken, middle-aged man, holds up one of the cards: “You can see in 1976, we sent our file to the public prosecutor,” he says. “They didn’t pursue it. We sent it again in 2005 and they took the case.”

The card is labelled “Oskar Gröning”, the name of the 95-year-old former SS member convicted in 2015 of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Rommel, the grandson of two German soldiers, is a former judge and public prosecutor. In October 2015, he accepted the role of lead prosecutor at The Central Office of the Land Judicial Authorities for the Investigation of Nationalist Socialist Crimes – the heart of Germany’s push to prosecute the last living Nazi war criminals.

The Central Office opened in 1958, in the leafy Lower Saxon town of Ludwigsburg, following the Einszagruppen trials in the nearby city of Ulm. Its mandate was to build cases for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, untouched by prior international law proceedings. Up until that point, such cases had usually been brought by German authorities when incriminating evidence fell into their hands by coincidence.

However, Central Office investigations immediately butted up against West Germany’s new constitution. With a fresh focus on human rights, the 1949 constitution stipulated that the Central Office couldn’t apply laws retroactively.

“Our problem was that we couldn’t deal with crimes against humanity or conspiracy because we thought, following our constitution, that we have to apply the law that is applicable from 1939-1945,” says Rommel.

Therefore prosecutions were held to peacetime legal standards – of linking a specific person to a specific crime – even if suspects could have been found guilty under the principles applied at the Nuremberg Trials.

Despite this handicap, the Central Office closed over 7,000 investigations in the 20th Century. Its most productive period being between 1967 and 1971, when it employed 121 staff to curate over 600 investigations. In those days, its mandate was still controversial. As Rommel says: “One of my predecessors had a gun and anonymous plates on his car in order not to be tracked down. In Ludwigsburg the taxi drivers wouldn’t drive you here.”

While public tensions with the office dried up by the end of the 20th century, so had new leads. So, to find more cases, the Central Office expanded to Eastern Europe, which had become more accessible to investigators at the end of the Cold War, roughly a decade earlier.

“In the 1950s there was no political will in Germany to let prosecutors go to the East to investigate documents. In the Cold War there was a struggle with ideologies, so there was a certain reluctance to rely on the evidence given by the other side,” says Rommel.

The term “political will” is used commonly in discussions about the prosecution of Nazis, as the German appetite for rehashing the most shameful period in its history has waxed and waned since the end of World War Two.

Chasing dead ends

For Efraim Zuroff, founder of Operation Last Chance, a campaign to find the last Nazi war criminals, the issue has always been desire: “There is certainly political will in Germany now, but their record has been terrible,” he says.

Zuroff’s operation is part of Jewish Human Rights agency, the Simon Weisenthal Center, named after the famous Austrian Nazi hunter. His privately-funded investigations have seen him traversing the globe and have contributed to the conviction of famous Nazis like Erich Priebke. However, this intrepid style has sometimes lead Zuroff to exhaustively pursue dead-ends – like Aribert Heim.

In his six weeks as doctor of Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Heim gained infamy for his grizzly operations – injecting gasoline into patient’s hearts and amputating limbs without anaesthetic – and was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of inmates.

As part of his comfortable post-war life, Heim practiced medicine in the southern resort town of Baden-Baden, even opening his own gynaecology clinic, until 1962 when he was indicted as a war criminal. After a tip-off, he fled.

After decades without a sighting, Heim was presumed dead, his final resting place a mystery. However, in 2008 German authorities uncovered an open European bank account, with a balance of roughly £750,000, under Heim’s name and suspiciously unclaimed by his heirs: a breakthrough that sparked an investigation by German authorities and OLC.

With a BBC documentary crew in-tow, Zuroff’s first stop was a small Chilean town, where a woman claiming to be Heim’s illegitimate daughter lived. He then went to Argentina – a popular spot for Nazis seeking post-war asylum and where Heim’s daughter said he had died in 1993 – but in both places Zuroff only heard of vague sightings of a man with Heim’s distinctive facial scar.

The investigation ended suddenly in February 2009 when a suitcase filled with Heim’s personal documents, including his death certificate, were turned over to the New York Times and German television station, ZDF.

Analysis of the documents showed that the man known as the “Butcher of Mauthausen” had escaped to Cairo and assumed the name Tarek Hussein Farid. He lived for over 30 years in exile and died of cancer in 1992 – before being buried anonymously – almost twenty years before Zuroff’s search began.

The absence of a body made Zuroff suspicious, “because the story seemed too perfect”, but any lingering disbelief subsided when a Baden-Baden court verified Heim’s death certificate in 2012.

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