A pamphlet published in 1956 in communist East Germany included a remarkable section about the West German Justice Minister Joachim von Merkatz, who had been the general secretary of the Ibero-American Institute during the Second World War. The author wrote that as an employee of what was ostensibly only a cultural institution but in fact ‘a spying centre for Ribbentrop's Foreign Ministry’, Merkatz had been involved in the planning of an assassination of the British diplomat Arthur Yenken in 1944. After the assassination had proved successful, the director of the institute, General Wilhelm Faupel, allegedly reported: ‘We’ve finally laid low that accursed Yenken. He's dead, literally brought down to the ground by Dr Panhorst and Commandant Moreno and sent directly to hell.’

The pamphlet was part of an East German attempt to discredit the Federal Republic, beginning in the 1950s, by trying to find incriminating evidence of fascism in the pasts of West German government members and high-ranking officials. But before long, East German researchers discovered that Faupel's letter could not possibly be genuine. In fact, Faupel's quote, written in the sort of purple prose one might find in a crime novel, came from one of the letters Heinrich Jürges had forged and sent to Silvano Santander. Later editions of the pamphlet omitted any mention of Merkatz. Those in charge of East German propaganda didn't need forgeries to excoriate the Nazi pasts of the West German elite – the personnel continuities with the Third Reich were too manifest to require that. In May 1957, East Germany began a campaign focused on judges, many of whom had helped to enforce Nazi law and legally legitimize the Nazi regime. In the months that followed, East German authorities published a series of pamphlets containing information about the activities of more than a thousand West German judges and lawyers during the Third Reich. It wasn't long before the West German embassy in London reported back to Bonn that both British media and the British parliament were taking a keen interest in this topic. Gradually, the West German government and legal system decided that it could no longer afford to ignore the accusations.

At the same time, the so-called Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial led a small group of judges and lawyers to believe that investigations into Nazi crimes should be centralized.