Chapter 7 - Tried for murder and manslaughter

It was an instrument with limitations, since its prosecutors could not -and cannot- investigate cases or accuse anyone, only collect information and transmit it, in each case, to the prosecutor's office of the place where the alleged criminals investigated resided. The lukewarmness of the legislation and the large number of former Nazis still in institutions made the task difficult: there simply had not been much interest in stirring up the past, and thousands of former murderers and torturers, following orders, or on their own initiative, they lived in Germany without being persecuted. The work of those Germans determined not to forget the past made history resound again in the consciences and the memory of the Holocaust and the Final Solution began to resurface, not only in Germany, but in the rest of the world. In the same year, Fritz Bauer, the prosecutor general of Hessen , Frankfurt, launched an investigation against possible murderers who had served in Auschwitz .