Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes

The Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes was established in Ludwigsburg in 1958, a significant marker of West Germany’s postwar turn toward investigating Nazi crimes. Its appearance in the account follows the exposure of the scale of the extermination program and the collapse of an effort to rehabilitate Nazism through denial, though the evidence does not specify the Office’s subsequent cases or methods.

Establishment and Context

The Office was established the year after Adenauer won the West German elections again in autumn 1957. Its founding is presented alongside the waning of the Nazi-oriented magazine Der Weg and the political consequences of testimony by Eichmann, who had described mass killings, gas chambers, forced labor, death marches, and famine during interviews conducted by Sassen and Fritsch. The account places the Office’s creation within this changing postwar climate; it does not state that the interviews directly caused its establishment.

The Rupture with Denial

The interviews unsettled Sassen, Fritsch, and the Dürer men’s club, who had resisted accounts of Nazi crimes as enemy propaganda. Eichmann’s confirmation of the extermination program, including the figure of six million Jewish victims, led the interviewers to distance themselves from him, and Dürer Publishing canceled the planned book. The Office’s founding in the following year therefore stands in sharp contrast to the club’s expectation that Nazism could return: the account describes the period as one in which that political future had closed, even as the work of investigating Nazi crimes acquired an institutional marker.

What the Account Establishes

The evidence names Ludwigsburg as the site of the Office’s establishment and 1958 as the year, but provides no account of its organization, legal powers, staff, or investigations. It also mentions the later creation of the United States Office of Special Investigations, a separate body established by the Carter administration to pursue Nazi criminals in the United States; the two institutions should not be conflated. The Central Office’s significance here is specific but consequential: its founding signals an official investigative response within postwar Germany, while the narrative leaves its subsequent work outside the scope of the account.