Will time catch the Third Reich’s last war criminals before Germany’s Nazi hunters?

Tucked away in the picturesque German city of Ludwigsburg, a tiny team of investigators tracks the last surviving Nazi war criminals across the globe and through the better part of a century, in an urgent race against time.

“We put together the smallest pieces of information, like the pieces of a puzzle, to work out who was employed in what role, from when until when” in Adolf Hitler’s totalitarian killing machine, says prosecutor Jens Rommel.

He has since 2015 led the eight-strong Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, at a time when the last perpetrators, accomplices, witnesses and survivors are finally vanishing.

Once all the perpetrators are gone, Germany will close the judicial side of its coming-to-terms with the Nazi government’s extermination of six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of others in the Holocaust.

In the meantime, the spectacle of frail defendants aged in their 90s appearing in courtrooms to answer for crimes dating back to 1945 or earlier has renewed vigorous debate about the country’s dark history.

For decades after the war, the German government and justice system showed little haste to track down many of those involved in the organised mass murder.