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The central office for the investigation of Nazi crimes in Ludwigsburg checks whether soldiers of the Wehrmacht are involved in crimes against Soviet prisoners of war.
The authority is investigating seven members of the Wehrmacht on suspicion of complicity in murder.
The soldiers are said to have guarded prisoner of war camps in which members of the Red Army were killed en masse.
Out of around 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war, up to 3.3 million died in German camps - around half of all soldiers interned in the war of extermination against the Soviet Union.
This mass murder now has legal consequences more than 70 years after the end of the war.
"In our central file there are around 250 stores with information about the guards who were deployed there," says the head of the central office, Thomas Will, to WELT AM SONNTAG.
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"From this pool we were able to identify around 2000 people from birth cohorts who may still be alive today," said the prosecutor.
The seven "test cases" so far served both in camps in the east and in what was then Reich territory.
The astonishingly late investigations can be traced back to a change in case law that has prevailed in Nazi proceedings since 2011.
At that time, the Munich Regional Court sentenced the former concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk to life imprisonment for serving in the Sobibor extermination camp.
The judges followed the indictment, according to which everyone who was on duty in an extermination camp was guilty of aiding and abetting murder - in the Holocaust, which is organized as a division of labor, supposedly harmless activities were also important in order to keep the machinery running.
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According to research by WELT AM SONNTAG, ten proceedings are still pending against men and women who have performed security guards or other work in concentration camps.
Charges have already been brought in two cases, and eight other cases have been handed over to public prosecutors.
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Source: Welt am Sonntag