From 1949 to 1973, 90 of the 170 leading lawyers and judges in the then-West German Justice Ministry had been members of the Nazi Party.

Of those 90 officials, 34 had been members of the Sturmabteilung (SA), Nazi Party paramilitaries who aided Hitler’s rise and took part in Kristallnacht, a night of violence that is believed to have left 91 Jewish people dead.

“There was very large continuity,” former Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who commissioned the study while in office, told German broadcaster Deutschlandfunk on Monday, according to English-language news site The Local.

In 1957, 77% of the ministry’s senior officials were former Nazis, which, according to the study, was a higher proportion that during Hitler’s Third Reich government, which existed from 1933 to 1945.

“We didn’t expect the figure to be this high,” the study’s coauthor, Christoph Safferling, who reviewed former ministry personnel files, told German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.