The RACE to CATCH THE LAST NAZIS

A lifetime after the Holocaust, a few of its perpetrators somehow remain at large. And the German detectives tasked with bringing them to justice are making a final desperate push to hunt them down,

- Tom Lamont

Thomas WILL'S  most recent trip to inspect a Nazi concentration camp took him to Płaszów in Poland, now a wooded rocky site with rusting train tracks and weather-beaten watchtowers still in place. Just before the 63-year-old German arrived, there happened to be a memorial service for the thousands of forced laborers who died at Płaszów, including those stalked for sport by the camp's commandant, Amon Göth. The villa where Göth once lived still exists. So do offices, jail cells. Visitors guided through on Schindler's List tours tend to cover the grounds in a few hours before moving on to a quarry where Spielberg filmed exteriors for his famous movie centered on the camp. Will wasn't so interested in the Hollywood aspect. Instead he lingered at windows, wondering about sight lines. He looked out over undulating land and asked himself, Who witnessed what, who ignored what? He was there not as mourner or as tourist but as investigator. Where others might have seen Płaszów as a place consigned to history, Will saw a crime scene, one that remains active even today.

He is one of the last in a long line of Nazi hunters, the chief of a German bureau created decades ago to investigate historic atrocities and to track down aiders and abettors of the Holocaust-those few that remain. All these years after the collapse of the Third Reich, many of the suspects that Will tries to bring to justice die on him. "After we have found them alive, after we have forwarded their cases to prosecutors.... People die while they are on trial," he would tell me. "It has become normal in our work. It is our work."