The race to catch the last Nazi war criminals
A lifetime after the Holocaust, a tiny number of its perpetrators still remain at large. And the German detectives tasked with bringing them to justice are making a final desperate push to hunt them down. By Tom Lamont
Thomas Will’s most recent trip to inspect a Nazi concentration camp took him to Płaszów in Poland, now a wooded, rocky site with rusting train tracks and weather-beaten watchtowers still in place. Just before the 63-yearold German arrived, there happened to be a memorial service for the thousands of forced labourers who died at Płaszów, including those stalked for sport by the camp’s commandant, Amon Göth. The villa in which Göth once lived still exists. So do offices, jail cells. Visitors guided through on Schindler’s List tours tend to cover the grounds in a few hours before moving on to a quarry where Steven Spielberg filmed exteriors for his Oscar-winning 1993 film. Will wasn’t so interested in the Hollywood aspect. Instead he lingered at windows, wondering about sight lines. He looked out over undulating land and asked himself, Who witnessed what, who ignored what? He was there not as mourner or tourist, but as investigator. Where others might have seen Płaszów as a place consigned to history, Will saw a crime scene, one that remains active even today.
He is one of the last in a long line of Nazi hunters, the chief of a German bureau created decades ago to investigate historic atrocities and to track down aiders and abettors of the Holocaust – those few that remain. All these years after the collapse of the Third Reich, many of the suspects that Will tries to bring to justice die on him. “After we have found them alive, after we have forwarded their cases to prosecutors… People die while they are on trial,” he told me. “It has become normal in our work. It is our work.”
He met me in an airy office at his organisation’s headquarters in the southern German town of Ludwigsburg. Will has a kind face, thick fingers, thick specs, and a bowl of jet-black hair that covers the upper half of both his ears. One of his predecessors, as chief of this bureau, was said to carry around a pistol on the job. Will is a more relaxed presence. His office is on the second floor and is dominated by a large oval conference table; the pale walls are decorated with colourful abstract paintings that Will chose himself. It was not until a few hours of intense conversation had passed between us that I noticed he’d sat me opposite a portrait of a naked man. Will smiled when I got up the courage to mention it. The abstract nude was by a friend, he explained. “A lot of people who come into this office are concentrated on other things,” he told me. “You just stared long enough to see it.” This is how Will approaches his role as bureau chief. He sits and he stares at Germany’s past long enough to see it.
The bureau was founded in 1958, a nationwide investigation agency mandated by the German government to scour the country and the wider world for Nazis. On Will’s business card, it is named in full as “the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes”, which is somehow even more unwieldy in German. For ease, people call it the bureau, or the central office, or the unit. Somewhat in the manner of a le Carré spy referring to MI5 as the Circus, Will uses an unexpected English phrase for his place of work – “our house”. He’ll say of some old, regretted decision not to pursue a promising piece of casework: “That was the opinion in our house at the time.” Or: “Shall I give you a tour through our house?”
When I said yes, he led me downstairs, passing the offices of a dozen or so of his colleagues, many of them former judges and prosecutors like Will himself. A row of mounted portraits showed his predecessors, including the last but one, a man named Kurt Schrimm, who in the early 2000s oversaw a change of direction at this bureau, reversing a decades-long trend of passivity (letting sleeping Nazis lie) and instead challenging his fellow investigators to think about the complicity and culpability of soldiers and employees at every level of that death-dealing regime. Will was hired under Schrimm in 2003 and has kept up his former boss’s belief in catching and collaring whoever they can, while they can. “The next generation will not have a chance to work judicially on this,” he said to me. “It ends in these years, now, in the 2020s. We have the last generation of perpetrators. We are prosecuting the last of the crimes.”
“The postwar years produced sensational, daring stories of Nazi hunting. These final years of the hunt are different. Quieter. Weirder”
In doing so, Will and his colleagues are heirs to a deep tradition of Nazi chasers, even if they differ – in task and technique – from their more swashbuckling forebears. Back in the 1960s, Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, was tracked to Buenos Aires, where he was living in secret as a married father of four and was known locally as Ricardo. The Mossad agents who found Eichmann drugged, disguised and then spirited him away for trial in Israel. Later that decade the camp commandant Franz Stangl was traced to a car plant in São Paulo by Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Holocaust survivor turned Nazi tracker.
The postwar years produced sensational, daring stories of Nazis being brought to justice. These final years of the hunt are different. Quieter. Weirder. Whatever noble thrills were available to those who ran down Eichmann, Göth, and the other famous
“The judge turned on his microphone and told everyone, ‘Die Angeklagte ist flüchtig.’ The defendant is on the run”
ghouls of the camps, these are not thrills that extend to Will, who in cleaning up the last of a mess has been asked to pursue people who may never have considered themselves Nazis at all. The targets Will has in his sights get around with the aid of canes or wheelchairs now. Bids for escape are pretty much off the table – that is, with one startling exception.
We stood together in front of an enormous map that showed the Third Reich at the height of its power and cruelty. “You see how many camps there were,” Will said. “Every blue dot?” I asked. These represented some 44,000 concentration camps, extermination camps, subcamps, and other sites of incarceration that were spread around a continental horror zone. “Yes.”
Panels of linoleum squeaked underfoot as we walked deeper into the building, ending up in a locked archive that was furnished wall-to-wall with grey filing cabinets. Will and his team deal mostly in names. They want the names of everyone who worked in or for one of those thousands of Nazi camps on the map. New names turn up all the time, even today, because of the sheer volume of paperwork accumulated under Hitler’s finicky regime. Other massive tranches of evidence had long ago been dispersed around the world, either by Nazis in flight or by liberating soldiers. Because of this, Will has spent time in dusty archives in Buenos Aires, Washington DC, London, Ottawa and Minsk. He took at least a dozen research trips to Moscow before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought his open invitation to an end. Will recently visited Jerusalem. When I asked how that went, he said, “I came back with names,” by which he meant it went well.
In the hunt for names, Will and his colleagues read pay slips, sick notes, expense requests, uniform and equipment bills, medals, memorials, roll-call records, transfer orders, promotion lists and passports. Sometimes they request that foreign governments unseal confidential spy reports. They try to find out which Germans emigrated where after the War and whether those emigrations were suspicious. Having spent so long picking over this trail of evidence, having read so many documents that richly detailed genocide, Will said he felt mostly unshockable: “I am professionally damaged maybe.” He once flew to Canberra in Australia to pick through old files that were originally from a Nazi extermination camp. He chose a file at random, opened it, and found that it was full of human hair. Will touched his chest, even now a little frightened. “I was not prepared for that.”
But he came back from Australia with names. And from Poland. And from Sweden. Whenever they have a new name, Will and his colleagues – the bureau employs roughly eight investigators at a time – consult grave-site indexes, trying to work out whether a name they’ve found belongs to someone living or dead. (The vast majority are dead.) They’ll call pension providers, insurance companies, vehicle-registration offices, genealogical firms, the Red Cross, the US Department of Justice, Interpol.
Since the era of Schrimm, the bureau’s reformer-in-chief, investigators here have sought to define and clarify the scale of the crime that was the Holocaust. The tendency has been towards enlargement of that crime: “Widening the circle,” Will called it, as he shifted about a packet of sugar and an empty espresso cup on his conference table. We were back upstairs in his office. His cup represented mass murder, and the sugar signified the limits of criminal culpability. He moved the sugar an inch from the cup, then two inches, then three, then four. Where did responsibility for the killings end? Here (one inch) with Hitler and his generals? Here (two inches) with camp commandants, doctors, executioners? Here (three inches) with military functionaries such as guards? Or here (four inches) with non-military functionaries, the secretaries, telephone operators, and so on?
The question is a live and urgent one in Germany because, at this point, it is really only the functionaries, the guards and secretaries, juvenile Nazis barely out of their teens when the regime collapsed, who may remain alive. Recently, for the first time in Germany’s history, a civilian employee of a Nazi camp was brought to trial as an accessory to mass murder. Will was reluctant to speak of this civilian by name, so important did he consider her prosecution to the work of the bureau. “The typist”, he kept calling her, referring to a woman that the rest of Germany knew either as Irmgard Furchner or as die Sekretärin des Bösen, the secretary of evil.
There have been strange trials resulting from probes begun in this bureau (one elderly former guard from the camps had to be pushed into court in a hospital bed), but none so strange as that of Furchner, which finished last winter. When she worked for the Nazis, she was in her teens. When she was indicted as an accessory to mass murder, she was in her 90s; arrangements would have to be made to get her from her nursing home to court in a van that could take a wheelchair.
Her trial was scheduled to start in September 2021. The local courthouse was considered too small for the fuss that Furchner’s hearing was expected to generate, so on the appointed day, observers from around the world made the journey to a temporary courthouse rigged up for the occasion in a warehouse. Representatives of Holocaust survivors were in attendance. Visiting diplomats. Tons of reporters. Early on the first day, it was obvious something was wrong. Furchner’s table was empty. The judge turned on his microphone and told everyone, “Die Angeklagte ist flüchtig.” The defendant is on the run.
It took a while to piece together what had happened. Very early in the morning, it seemed, before that police van arrived at Furchner’s nursing home to take her to court, she’d left the facility by taxi and travelled to a station on the Hamburg-bound metro. From there she went into Hamburg itself, where city police would have been radioing each other about a fugitive: nonagenarian woman; white hair; uncertain mobility; wanted as an accessory to mass murder. Her lawyer, Wolf Molkentin, said of her flight from justice: “It wasn’t flight, not in the strictest sense. She didn’t want to attend the trial so she went to Hamburg and waited to be arrested. She made a point. It felt more like... what’s the word? Rebellion is too much. Maybe I can say that her subjectivity was expressed by it.” After Hamburg police found Furchner walking along a street later that day, she was arrested and held for five nights in a cell until Molkentin could argue for her release.
It was agreed she would wear a tracking device.
When Furchner’s trial resumed, she was charged with abetting the murder of 11,387 women, men and children; she was being held jointly accountable for the death of every person confirmed to have died during her employment at a concentration camp. The camp in question was a place called Stutthof. Of the 64,000
people who would ultimately lose their lives in Stutthof, some were tricked to their deaths, ushered aboard a plausible-looking train and then gassed, or ordered to stand still to be measured before they were shot from behind. Most perished from malnourishment or disease in the barracks. Furchner was 18 when she got there. A photograph from this period shows a pale young woman wearing a dark dress, smiling as she posed in front of the brickwalled administration building that was now her daily place of work. Her job was to take dictation from the camp commandant, Paul-Werner Hoppe, a figure who routinely wrote execution orders and arranged killings on site. Sometimes he dictated memos to his employees that combined the terrible and the mundane. There would be a cheerful announcement of someone’s promotion and on the same piece of typed paper (just another bullet point on an agenda), advice about the sorts of wagons that would be needed for a transport of prisoners to Auschwitz.
The investigation into Furchner began at the bureau in 2016. They had her name on file because she had testified decades earlier at the trial of Hoppe. Next, they had to persuade a prosecutor’s office formally to indict her, which occurred by 2017. That’s when two cops and a prosecutor showed up at the nursing home and found Furchner in her bed, watching television. While the cops searched her possessions, the prosecutor informed Furchner she would face trial. According to later testimony, she replied by saying that it was lächerlich – ridiculous.
The trial got under way in the autumn of 2021. Apart from her occasional muttered complaints about malfunctioning audio equipment, some yeses and nos as the judge inquired after her health, Furchner was rarely heard over the 14 months of the trial. Instead, her lawyer Wolf Molkentin spoke on her behalf. He argued that a young woman of the Third Reich would have been shielded from the purpose of Stutthof by her male superiors, men who we know liked to flatter themselves as sophisticates because they spoke of “special treatment” (never gassings) and “evacuations” (never death marches).
As prosecuting lawyers sought to lay out the full horror of Stutthof, they invited survivors to testify. People spoke of their fear, the hunger, barking dogs, outbreaks of typhus in the filthy barracks that were the result of a willed neglect almost as lethal as a bullet or a pellet of Zyklon B gas. Josef Salomonovic was six when he arrived by cattle car. His father was murdered in the camp infirmary: injected in the heart with poison. Salomonovic told the court he still had nightmares about this. Another child of the camp, Halina Strnad, spoke about watching a pregnant inmate die in labour. The baby was stillborn. Somehow it fell to Strnad to dispose of the body, which she tried to do in the camp latrines. Strnad told the court she still had nightmares.
Strnad addressed the court by video link from her Australian home. One of the main points in Furchner’s defence was that she was ignorant of any actual killings in the camp. “I can’t imagine how it was possible not to know what was happening,” Strnad countered. “There was a constant stench of burned corpses.” Not long after speaking these words to the court, Strnad died at the age of 92. She did not live long enough to hear the verdict that was reached in December 2022, when Furchner was found guilty on almost all of the 11,387 counts, pending appeal, aged 97.
There are many people in Germany who feel that marginal abettors of the Nazi regime, elderly accessories such as Furchner, ought to be left alone. What choice did they have at the time? Wouldn’t they only have been murdered themselves if they refused to take part? Will and others have pointed out that it was only prisoners in the camps who risked execution if they refused duties that kept these sites functional. The vast majority of camp guards, as many as 95%, according to historian Stefan Hördler, had an option to volunteer for combat service instead. Meanwhile, female employees of the camps were always designated as civilians, which means they could have chosen to work somewhere else, Hördler has said.
Will and I decided to go for lunch at a place serving bratwurst sausages and vinegary lentils. A case against another elderly Nazi had recently fallen apart after months of work, Will admitted to me that day. The accused, 99 years old and a former guard at a camp called Ravensbrück, died right as preliminary legal proceedings were about to begin. “I thought it could get to trial, but it was not to be,” Will said, with a shake of the head. “I am not absent of emotion. I think to myself, Oh, such a pity. But that doesn’t help. It’s no use.” He agreed with my suggestion; it was perfectly possible that Irmgard Furchner would turn out to be the last ever person tried for Nazi crimes. He hoped not. At the bureau they’d spent time investigating a 97-year-old who guarded the Neuengamme camp. That case was currently with a public prosecutor. There were four other active cases moving slowly towards regional courts, though the accused involved were between 98 and 101 years old and at any moment one or another of them might die and be condemned to the archives, put among the thousands of investigations turned cold.
Will was used to this part of the job, he said. Since the start of his tenure at the bureau he’d experienced the forced severing of many a dangling thread. There was the former soldier who wrote Will a letter to protest his innocence, and afterwards shot himself with an old service revolver. There were the wanted German émigrés found living in quiet retirement in Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and small-town Tennessee, each of whom died before they could be extradited. When I first met Will, I had wondered why on earth he and his colleagues continued to put in so much effort under conditions that were increasingly futile. They were stuck on one of history’s stranger cul-de-sacs, hastening towards a visible dead end that came closer every day. Now I saw that the effort was the point. Their work is a gesture. It is supposed to be noticed by those who would commit war crimes now or in the future. It is a warning to wavering abettors, that a killing can be passive as well as active, brought about by standing guard at a gate or tapping at keys on a typewriter.
When the last person of interest to him dies, when every case is archived and cold, Will’s team will disband. Their building may become a museum, he guessed. He was due to be visited by a ministerial aide from the German capital soon, who would help decide next steps. Such decisions were for others, over his head, Will said. He had investigative work still to do. New leads had recently landed on his desk, an unexpected late bounty, something like 2,500 names belonging to people who once received their wages from a savings account connected to the Ravensbrück camp. Some of them, surely, must still be alive.
“When the last person of interest to Will dies, when every case is cold, his team will disband”