Crime
New Search Engine Lets Users Check Whether Ancestors Were Nazi Party Members
People can now find out whether their ancestors were members of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party, thanks to a new German online search engine, according to media reports.
The tool, called NSDAP-Mitgliederkartei, was launched by the German newspaper Die Zeit in cooperation with archives in Germany and the United States. It makes millions of Nazi Party membership cards searchable. The cards, once stored in Munich, were saved from destruction at the end of World War II and later played a key role in Germany’s denazification process.
As Hitler’s Reich collapsed, Nazi officials ordered the millions of party membership cards to be pulped. According to Die Zeit, the trove was rescued by Hanns Huber, the director of a nearby paper mill, who later handed them over to the Americans.
For nearly half a century, the records were stored at the Berlin Document Center under U.S. control. In 1994, they were transferred to the German Federal Archives, with microfilm copies sent to the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Between 1925 and 1945, around 10.2 million Germans became members of the Nazi Party. Until recently, access to the membership records required formal requests to German authorities. In March, the U.S. Archives began releasing the records online. Die Zeit said it obtained the data and "backed up the documents to make them easily searchable."
Judith Busch, a spokesperson for Die Zeit, said the response has been "overwhelming," adding that the tool has been "accessed millions of times and shared thousands of times."
Christian Rainer, an Austrian, said he found his grandfather’s name "within a few seconds." The records showed that his grandfather joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) on April 21, 1938, just days after Hitler annexed Austria.
Rainer said the discovery confirmed suspicions about his grandfather’s Nazi ties but also cleared other family members.
"I was happy I didn't find anyone else from my family, especially not my father. I had never suspected him of being a Nazi. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1941 and wounded several times," he told media.
Rainer said the project resonates deeply: "Eight decades on, after the end of the World War, you can still find out truth that you haven’t known before."
