BAD AROLSEN, Germany - An old man on trial in Munich for war crimes. A determined Nazi hunter in Jerusalem. A methodical Red Cross official in Germany. A tough claims negotiator in New York.

And millions of survivors.

For all of them, the books are still open on World War II. Sixty years after the liberation of Europe from Nazi domination, much unfinished business remains.

A handful of justice officials are pursuing Hitler's henchmen in the greatest murder machine the modern world has known, which systematically slaughtered 12 million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals or others considered misfits in the Aryan scheme.

Even today, researchers are recovering and recording the names of those exterminated in assembly-line gas chambers or who were worked to death in concentration camps. Thousands are added each year.

Families are still being reunited as the International Red Cross continues to track down people who went missing during or after the war.

Of the 3.2 million German soldiers and civilians deported to the gulags by the victorious Soviet Union between the end of the war and the death of dictator Josef Stalin in 1953, 1.2 million remain unaccounted for, according to the German Red Cross. It says that each year it finds about 500 still alive.

Survivors of the Nazi onslaught are still seeking - or were only recently awarded - restitution for their suffering - as subjects of inhuman medical experiments, as forced laborers in Nazi munitions factories and as refugees turned away by neutral Switzerland.

"More than the restitution of money, what we do is the restitution of history," said Gideon Taylor, head of the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

The German government has paid $80 billion in reparations, including $60 billion negotiated by the Claims Conference since 1952, to individual survivors and the state of Israel. Taylor calls the payment a "symbolic acknowledgment" of immeasurable evil.

Many names of the dead may be lost forever. In their attempt to obliterate the Jewish people, the Germans eradicated entire villages and burned their synagogues, leaving neither survivors nor records. Of 6 million Jewish dead, as many as 1 million may be consigned to oblivion, said Alexander Avraham, who is compiling the names for Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Time is running out to set history right; in a decade or two, the last survivor will be dead.

"The witnesses are getting fewer and fewer. Soon there will be no one to tell us he was a victim," said Udo Jost, of the International Tracing Service, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The archive in Bad Arolsen, a German spa town in the rolling hills near the Dutch border, is a labyrinth of metal cabinets containing tattered work booklets, yellowing transport lists and thick concentration camp registration books that document the existence of people otherwise erased from history.

Evidence of tortures beyond comprehension are recorded with the dryness of a bookkeeper's files.

One inmate's name has been preserved only because a single louse was found in his hair, and was thus registered in smudged ink on the daily Lice Control Card of Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

The Tracing Service began as an Allied unit to find missing persons, but now mostly provides documentation for people seeking reparations for persecution. After Germany agreed in 2000 to compensate former slave laborers, it processed 930,000 requests for proof within 22 months.

So far, the service has amassed 17.5 million names - the index cards alone of 50 million references fill three large rooms. Its emissaries - like those of Yad Vashem - are hunting for more names in the archives of Eastern Europe which became accessible 15 years ago with the fall of the Iron Curtain.

As survivors die, Jost, a German who says his countrymen cannot deny their unwanted past, wants to pass on the legacy to young people, "Not to make them feel guilty, but so they know it should not happen again."

That past is again playing out in a Munich courtroom where Ladislav Niznansky is on trial, charged with 164 counts of murder in three massacres of Slovak civilians in early 1945.

Now 87, a German citizen since 1996, he struggles to maintain his proud bearing, though he grows tired after listening to lengthy testimony and visibly shrinks into his chair. The court raises the volume of its loudspeakers to accommodate his poor hearing.

When his trial opened last September, he stood erect as he voiced his defense: He never ordered massacres. He never murdered anyone. He was an involuntary soldier, a Slovak forced to fight for the Nazis or be sent to a labor camp.

Niznansky is the only Nazi suspect currently on trial anywhere for war crimes, and his case could drag on for many months.

Other accused former Nazis, mostly camp guards, face deportation in United States and Canada for hiding their past. One of the best known is John Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio auto worker. Accused of being a sadistic concentration guard, his case has lasted 27 years. The refugee from Ukraine has twice been stripped of his U.S. citizenship, was sentenced to death by an Israeli court, freed on appeal and returned to Ohio. Now 84, he is again fighting deportation.

A special unit of the U.S. Justice Department is reviewing more cases, some of them brought to light by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center.

"We're not finished yet," vows Efraim Zuroff, head of the Jerusalem office of the center, named for the legendary Austrian Nazi hunter. Wiesenthal himself, now 96, is retired. His associates in Vienna are digitally copying his copious files on such infamous Nazis as Martin Bormann, one of Hitler's top lieutenants; and Dr. Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz camp doctor. Neither was ever found but both are believed dead.

Tens of thousands of former Nazis are still alive and should be prosecuted, said Zuroff, 56, who calls himself the last nongovernment Nazi hunter. Only a fraction of the 90,000 indictments issued by Germany after the war were ever brought to court, he said.

Zuroff says 940 suspects were under investigation as of March 2004 in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Italy, Austria, the United States and elsewhere. Since 2001, he said, 27 people have been convicted for wartime activities, although all but six were tried on immigration and naturalization violations.

The war was not a zero-sum game of persecutors and their victims. Millions of Europeans lived through German occupation in France, the Netherlands, Belgium. For many, suppressed memories are only now being pried open. New tales of tragedy and treachery are still emerging, as the war generation reaches its end and reconsiders its legacy.

There is more unfinished business for thousands of war babies fathered by German soldiers to women in occupied countries. Now in their 60s, they are demanding compensation for their humiliation. And there are thousands more Germans who became refugees in the postwar redrawing of borders. Many of them also see themselves as uncompensated war victims.

A Polish Holocaust survivor, Henryk Pikielny, has filed a claim with the European Court on Human Rights to recover his family's manufacturing company. In March, the German retail chain KarstadtQuelle lost an appeal against a ruling to return a plot in Berlin seized from a Jewish family. It is now worth millions of dollars.