These final years of the hunt are different. Quieter. Weirder.

October 19, 2023 3:53 PM

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 whomever 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.” from The Race to Catch the Last Nazis [GQ; ungated]
posted by chavenet (4 comments total)

If you compare this with Operation Paperclip it really shows the value of a STEM education.
posted by kingdead at 4:57 PM on October 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

This was a lovely piece of writing. Thanks for sharing it.
posted by Well I never at 5:50 PM on October 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's really interesting reading this in the aftermath of the whole Hunka debacle here in Canada. There are still people alive right now that were Nazis but because they weren't directly involved in the mass killings they've been able to tell themselves and others that they were something else. "I'm not a Nazi, I was a secretary in an office and took dictation" or "I'm not a Nazi, I was defending my country against the Soviets". And people, including authorities, knew about them and did nothing because they too thought they weren't really Nazis, or even if they were that they were unimportant enough to ignore. The court in Germany found that Irmgard Furchner, a secretary, was guilty on almost all of the 11,387 counts of abetting murder. We'll have to wait and see what will happen to Hunka.

Also, article mentions that there's still a thousand yards of files in the archive in Germany that hadn't been read yet. I wonder if AI could have some use in helping processing that.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:59 PM on October 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I agree; what a moving, well-crafted article. I've often thought about the perpetrators who get to die of old age, after living a long life the people they helped kill in the camps were robbed of. From the article: "“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.” No one who was there can claim innocence. They knew what was on those papers they were pushing.
posted by but no cigar at 7:25 PM on October 19, 2023 [5 favorites]