Was Your Family Tied to the Nazis? There's a Database

A German newspaper has turned a trove of Nazi Party records into a searchable tool, and it's had millions of hits already from those using it to check their family history. Die Zeit, working with Germany's Federal Archives and the US National Archives, has put a database online that covers roughly 10.2 million people who joined Adolf Hitler's party between 1925 and 1945, reports CNN. The paper says the project is meant to help Germans confront their past and "end the silence born of misplaced shame." At its height near the end of World War II, the Nazi Party counted about 9 million members, according to Die Zeit.

The membership cards, nearly destroyed in the final days of the war, were rescued by the head of a local paper mill, per the BBC. They were later stored in the Berlin Document Center and eventually transferred to German federal custody, with copies kept in the US, per CNN. Die Zeit obtained the data and, using AI, built what its history editor Christian Staas calls a "convenient search option." He tells CNN that demand has been intense—far higher than the roughly 75,000 annual inquiries the archives typically receive—and suggests many people are more willing to ask questions now that most former party members have died. Polls, he notes, show that relatively few Germans believe their forebears supported the regime, a disconnect he hopes the tool may correct.

Users have been sending the outlet their reactions—some confirming long-held suspicions, others uncovering painful new details. One wrote of discovering both grandfathers had joined the party, another of finally learning that an irritable great-grandfather was indeed a member, and a third of finding that the non-Jewish husband of a Jewish relative had signed up in 1933, with his wife later murdered at the Kulmhof extermination camp. Christine Schmidt of London's Wiener Holocaust Library called the tool "a boon for scholarship," saying easier access to the records is a major step for historical reckoning and a useful counter to efforts to distort or deny the history of the Holocaust.