Since about 2006, a dozen or so federal ministries and major agencies founded shortly after the war began to have aspects of their past, from the time before and/or after 1945, investigated by independent commissions and research projects.

This study, supported by the Bundestag (BT-Printed Matter 17/11001), was carried out by the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History together with the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam, at the request of the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media. The project first provides a compact review of previous projects and looks into their methods, approaches, and emerging problems. Secondly, it points out which other federal ministries and top-level agencies might best be investigated with regard to their possible Nazi pasts and how they have dealt with those pasts. This includes agencies that no longer exist and/or were founded in the Federal Republic of Germany for the first time but which had partial or institutional predecessors during the Nazi era. And the study, thirdly, speaks to the potential for future work on the historical appraisal of such agencies and looks into the utility of expanding and harmonizing these research perspectives.