THEY are the cowering monsters who for decades have hidden among us across all corners of the globe.
But as the world’s last remaining fugitives try to escape justice, one man is on a mission to snare every last one of ‘s henchmen – and reveals he has his next target in sight.
Hitler’s henchmen are still being brought to justice to this day
Nazi criminals like John Demjanjuk have been hunted down decades later
With his thick-framed glasses and lawyerly manner, Thomas Will paints an unlikely picture of a man seeking vengeance against evil.
But this is Germany’s top Nazi hunter, who has devoted his career to bringing those responsible for the Holocaust’s six million murders to justice.
With this year marking the 80th anniversary of the end of , he now faces a desperate race against time.
From a vast database stretching to a staggering 700,000 names suspected of crimes during the , only 100 remain unaccounted for.
But, as he guides us around his astonishing bunker of research, Thomas admits he has precious few clues as to their whereabouts – or if they are even still alive.
Nonetheless, the determined prosecutor refuses to give up the hunt for those who did Adolf Hitler’s bidding in the most wicked regime in history and is determined to see them in court before they die if he can track them down.
He said: “Germany made a decision to take responsibility for what happened.
“That means we keep looking for them and if we find them we build a case which will hopefully see them answer for what they have done in a court of law.
“There is no statute of limitations for murder, the clock never runs out and we will never give up looking for them.”
Thomas is the Senior Public Prosecutor in charge of Germany’s Central Office for the investigation of Nazi crimes, based in a former prison in the small town of Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart.
Set up in 1958, the unit has amassed a huge amount of information about who did what in the , from the architects of the down to the most junior guards and admin staff.
At the heart of the investigation is a vast card index, which details the names of 727,717 Nazi suspects and 656,970 potential crime scenes.
A total of 1.7million cards are stored in 258 metal filing cabinets in a locked room behind 3in-thick metal doors secured with deadbolts, such is their historical importance.
Nearby in a humidity-controlled store room is more than half a mile of shelving weighed down with case files from the near 8,000 investigations the unit has launched, many involving multiple suspects, and the 18,000 cases that have come before Germany’s courts.
The four-storey building – in a compound surrounded by a 12ft stone wall – is the command and control centre for Germany’s attempt to take responsibility for the greatest crime in history.
At the peak of its work in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Central Office had 121 staff running around 600 investigations at any one time.
Thanks to the passage of time, the work has slowed to a trickle as almost everyone who worked at the camps is now dead – but it’s not quite over.
Net closing in
Thomas Will has devoted his career to bringing those responsible for the Holocaust’s six million murders to justice
The Sun was granted access to storage rooms in Germany’s Central Office for the investigation of Nazi crimes
In recent years, Thomas and his reduced team of six prosecutors and nine office staff have secured six convictions – and he tells The Sun that another case is in the pipeline.
Thomas explained: “He did not directly murder anyone but it is murder by circumstance. The people at the camps were treated as if they were nothing, the conditions were so appalling that many died.
“So it is murder by circumstance.
“The people who prevented the inmates escaping are as guilty as those who did the killing.”
Thomas grew up in the Bavarian city of Erlangen where he studied law at university, joining the Central Office in 2003 after holding down various other jobs in the legal sector and becoming its head five years ago.
In those years he has travelled the world to inspect hundreds of thousands of war-time documents to build the database of the Third Reich, including to America, and the British National Archives at Kew, west .
He has worked off the tiniest clues from documents such as passenger lists in , a notorious haven for Nazis who fled Germany as the Allies liberated the camps.
And he has made 15 trips to Russia, which proved to be a treasure trove of information thanks to the huge amount of Nazi paperwork seized by Russian troops in 1945.
That line of investigation has now been slammed shut thanks to tyrant , but it did uncover one gem when the name of Josef Schütz leapt out of an old document.
The 101-year-old monster
Sachsenhausen concentration camp was built in 1936 to house high-ranking political prisoners
Former Nazi concentration camp guard Josef Schütz was the oldest person to be jailed for Holocaust war crimes
In 2022 Schütz, by then 101 and the oldest person ever to be convicted for Holocaust war crimes, was given a five-year jail sentence for being an accessory to murder at the Sachsenhausen camp, north of Berlin.
Thomas said: “We had never heard of him before and there was his name in this old document.
“There can be lots of frustration with many hours of work producing nothing, but moments like this make it all worthwhile.
“I had made 15 trips to and I had my bags packed ready for another one in 2022.
“Then Russia invaded and I could not go.”
‘Devil Next Door’
Ivan John Demjanjuk was described as a ‘Watchman’ on his ID card at his labour camp in Trawniki, Poland
Demjanjuk was the first to receive a guilty verdict for simply working at the camps
The Central Office probes were given a boost in 2011 with the landmark conviction of John Demjanjuk, the first guilty verdict handed to someone for simply working at the camps rather than actually taking part in killings.
The Ukrainian-born retired factory worker and death camp guard – the – was convicted of 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder and sentenced to five years in prison.
Thomas said: “In previous decades, guards had largely not been prosecuted.
“This new approach meant it was no longer necessary to prove a specific individual act of killing.
“Simply performing your duties could constitute complicity. The guard who forced people to stay at the camp, who was beating and shooting them if they tried to escape, is just as guilty as the person doing the killing.
“It shows what a huge world event it was. It was not one crime, it was endless crimes.”
Accessory to 300,000 murders
Oskar Gröning was a former Nazi SS guard who was known as the ‘Bookkeeper of Auschwitz’
Gröning was convicted for being an accessory to 300,000 murders
Gröning’s registration card revealed stark details of his guilt
It was a crucial precedent that meant even the smallest cog in the Nazis’ killing machine could be held to account, but understated Thomas didn’t pop the champagne corks with his colleagues.
Instead he went straight back to work to build more cases, adding: “I was happy of course, but I am a prosecutor, it’s what we do. So we just carried on looking for more people to prosecute.”
With a quiet yet steely determination, he continued to scour the world for clues, which eventually led to five further convictions including that of Oskar Gröning in 2015.
The junior SS recruit had the job at Auschwitz of sorting banknotes taken from trainloads of Jews transported to the camp to be systematically killed, a role that saw him convicted for being an accessory to 300,000 murders.
Thomas heads to the card index to show us Gröning’s entry, a 6x4in yellow card protected by a plastic sleeve that gives the stark details of his guilt – he worked for the SS at Auschwitz between September 28, 1942 and October 17, 1944.
The ‘secretary of evil’
Irmgard Furchner was an admin assistant to the commander of the Stutthof camp in Poland
Furchner was found guilty of aiding more than 10,000 murders
The team’s last success was Irmgard Furchner, dubbed the “Secretary of Evil” thanks to her role as admin assistant to the commander of the Stutthof camp in .
In 2022 she was found guilty of aiding more than 10,000 murders, just a fraction of the estimated 65,000 Jewish people, political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses and gay people who were killed there between 1939 and 1945.
Thomas said: “She could see the barracks from her office, she could see the gas chamber and she could see the crematorium.
“It was state-controlled extermination with perfect bureaucracy and organisation and by working for the commander of the camp she did acts to support this mass killing.”
Furchner died earlier this year aged 99 and some fear she will be the last to ever face justice for the Holocaust.
‘Job not finished yet’
Reinhold Hanning was a guard who met Jewish prisoners off trains and escorted them to the gas chambers
Hanning was jailed for being an accessory to 300,000 murders
Bruno Dey was convicted for being an accessory to the murder of 5,232 people at Stutthof concentration camp
The watchtower guard was given a two-year suspended sentence as he was only 17 at the time of his crimes
But Thomas refuses to give up the fight and is hopeful the latest case of the 99-year-old guard – for which his team prepared a damning 140-page dossier of evidence – will make it to court.
As for those who say a line should be drawn under the crimes of the past and should move on, he is not the only one who dismisses that argument.
Dr Robert Rozett is a senior historian at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in .
He said: “The idea that people should get away with a crime is not a reasonable idea.
“The vast majority of the criminals did get away with their crimes but it’s important that those who can be brought to justice are.
“And it’s important to all of us to understand the processes that brought this about.
“We need to be aware of these processes and guard against them and protect our societies from them.
“Bringing people to justice helps highlight all of those things.
“But it is very late in the day to do that now, it’s not even the last few minutes, it’s the last few seconds.”
As the clock ticks through those last few seconds, there is hardly anyone still left alive to answer for the unspeakable crimes committed in support of Hitler’s evil regime.
But if they are, Thomas is determined to catch up with them.
He celebrated his 65th birthday this year but has no plans to step down.
As he leads us through countless secure doors and into the compound guarded from the outside world by the high stone wall, he says: “It is an important job and it is not finished yet.”
Nazis nailed
John Demjanjuk – After the war he emigrated to Ohio where he worked in a car factory. Despite protesting his innocence for decades he was finally convicted in 2011 of being an accessory to the 28,060 murders that occurred during his service at Sobibor, in occupied Poland. He was sentenced to five years in jail but died ten months later aged 91.
Oskar Gröning – By his own admission, Gröning was an “enthusiastic Nazi” when he joined the SS and went to work as an accountant at Auschwitz, often stealing cash and jewellery from Jews on their way to the gas chambers. He was sentenced to four years in jail in 2015 for being an accessory to 300,000 murders. His lawyers filed a series of appeals meaning he died in 2018 aged 96 before he had started his jail term.
Reinhold Hanning – The retired dairy farmer was convicted in 2016 of being an accessory to 170,000 people at Auschwitz where he worked as a guard. His job was to meet Jewish prisoners off trains and escort them to the gas chambers. The judge told him: “You were part of a criminal organisation and took part in criminal activity.” He died a year later aged 95.
Bruno Dey – Wheelchair-bound Dey was convicted in 2020 of being an accessory to the murder of 5,232 people at Stutthof concentration camp in the final months of the war. They included the deaths of 5,000 prisoners in a typhus outbreak because they were denied access to food, water and medication. The watchtower guard was given a two-year suspended sentence as he was only 17 at the time of his crimes.
Irmgard Furchner – Dubbed the “secretary of evil”, Furchner worked as the admin assistant for the commander of the Stutthof camp in Poland. The court heard that due to her role she was fully aware of everything that was going on at the camp with more than 10,000 people being murdered there during her tenure. She was given a two-year suspended sentence as she was a juvenile at the time. She died in January aged 99.
Josef Schütz – The camp guard became the oldest person convicted of Holocaust crimes when he was found guilty of being an accessory to the murders of 3,518 prisoners in 2022 aged 101. He was given a five-year jail term. The court heard he aided and abetted the execution of prisoners of war by firing squad and by using poisonous gas Zyklon B. He was given five years but appealed and died less than a year later aged 102 without beginning his sentence.
Gregor Formanek – After lengthy battles by his lawyers who claimed he was too frail to stand trial, Formanek was deemed fit to face court last December over claims he aided and abetted the murder of 3,300 people while working as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Berlin. Formanek died aged 100 earlier this year before he could be put in the dock.
Gregor Formanek was dubbed the ‘last Nazi’ after being tracked down by The Sun
Formanek died aged 100 earlier this year before he could be put in the dock 
