The Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes was established in Ludwigsburg in 1958, creating a dedicated institutional response to Nazi crimes in the aftermath of the war. Its arrival followed years in which perpetrators and their supporters disputed or evaded responsibility; in the book’s account, the office’s creation signals a turn away from the hope that Nazism might regain a future in Germany and toward the work of investigation.

Background: Denial Meets Testimony

In the mid-1950s, Willem Sassen and Eberhard Fritsch interviewed Adolf Eichmann for a proposed book. Eichmann’s account confirmed the scale and organization of the extermination program, including mass killings, forced labor, death marches, and starvation. Sassen and Fritsch had hoped that Hitler had been betrayed or that Eichmann had been manipulated by foreign powers. Confronted with the account, they distanced themselves from Eichmann, and Dürer Publishing canceled the book, although Sassen kept the tapes. The episode exposed the gap between the men’s attachment to Nazism and the evidence of what its leaders had done.

The change was not simply a matter of testimony becoming available: the book describes a setting in which the crimes could be acknowledged and still resisted. The interviewers had not expected Eichmann to verify the extermination program so directly; once he did, they could no longer present their project as a defense of an unblemished Nazi cause. The Central Office’s establishment the following year belongs to a different register of response: investigation rather than private efforts to shape the public account.

Establishment in Ludwigsburg

After Konrad Adenauer won the election again in autumn 1957, the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes was established in Ludwigsburg the following year. The account gives no detailed description of its internal organization or specific cases at the time of its founding. Its stated purpose, however, is clear from its name: the investigation of National Socialist crimes. The significance of the event lies in making that task an enduring institutional responsibility rather than leaving the reckoning solely to testimony, journalism, or isolated prosecutions.

The timing gives the establishment particular weight. The proposed Eichmann book had been abandoned, Der Weg had foundered, and Fritsch closed his publishing house and moved to Austria in early 1958. These developments did not themselves bring perpetrators to justice, but they form the political and cultural backdrop to the new office: the organized defense of Nazism was losing ground even as the work of documenting and pursuing its crimes remained necessary.

The Crimes Under Investigation

The book sets this postwar turn against the conduct that investigators and witnesses had to confront. Miklós Nyiszli, a Jewish doctor forced to assist Josef Mengele at Auschwitz, later recorded the camp’s operations and the medical experiments performed on twins and dwarves. His account describes Mengele conducting selections on arriving transports and treating those decisions as a professional duty. It also recounts experiments carried out without consent, and the transfer of organs to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin for research. These were not merely individual acts detached from institutions: the evidence connects violence in the camp to medical language, wartime scientific work, and channels for sending research material onward.

Mengele’s later defense to his son shows the persistence of that language after the war. He described his actions as military duty in the service of German science, claimed that selection had saved lives, and presented himself as a subordinate cog who had not created Auschwitz. That account is contradicted by the testimony and evidence the book presents. In 1964, the universities of Frankfurt and Munich withdrew his doctoral degrees in medicine and anthropology because of his crimes at Auschwitz and his violation of the Hippocratic Oath. The revocations were a distinct act of institutional accountability, not an action attributed to the Ludwigsburg office, but they underscore the wider postwar contest over professional standing and responsibility.

Later Reckoning and Significance

The effort to pursue Nazi criminals continued through other institutions and public campaigns. At the 1985 mock trial at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, survivors of Mengele’s experiments testified publicly. The testimony helped provoke renewed international pressure for his capture. Later that year, a police search of Hans Sedlmeier’s home uncovered correspondence and address records that led investigators toward Brazil, where people in Mengele’s circle were questioned and monitored. The book presents these developments as part of the longer pursuit of a fugitive; it does not identify them as operations of the Ludwigsburg office.

The Central Office’s establishment therefore marks a beginning in the institutionalization of investigation, not the completion of postwar justice. The surrounding narrative repeatedly contrasts official and professional forms of accountability with the evasions of former Nazis and the concealment networks that protected them. In that contrast, the 1958 office represents a consequential change of direction: crimes once defended as duty or dismissed as enemy propaganda were increasingly made the subject of organized investigation.