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

A major German newspaper has launched a new online tool that allows people to search through millions of records tied to the Nazi Party, and the response has been enormous. The project, created by Die Zeit in cooperation with Germany’s Federal Archives and the US National Archives, compiles information on about 10.2 million individuals who joined Adolf Hitler’s party between 1925 and 1945. According to CNN, the newspaper says the database is intended to help Germans face the realities of their country’s past and break what it described as a long-standing silence driven by misplaced shame. At the peak of its power near the end of World War II, the Nazi Party had roughly 9 million members, Die Zeit reports.

The membership cards that make up the collection nearly disappeared during the final days of the war. As the BBC reports, they were saved when the head of a nearby paper mill intervened and prevented their destruction. The documents were later kept at the Berlin Document Center before eventually being transferred to Germany’s federal archives, while duplicate records were preserved in the United States, according to CNN. Using that data, Die Zeit applied artificial intelligence to organize the material and create a searchable system. Christian Staas, the paper’s history editor, described it to CNN as an easy-to-use search tool.

Interest in the project has far exceeded expectations. Staas said the database has drawn far more attention than the roughly 75,000 requests the archives typically receive in a year. He suggested that many people may now feel more comfortable investigating their family history because most former Nazi Party members are no longer alive. Surveys in Germany have long shown that only a small number of people believe their own relatives supported the Nazi regime, a gap between perception and reality that Staas hopes the database may help clarify.

People who have used the tool have shared a wide range of reactions with the newspaper. Some say it confirmed suspicions they had held for years, while others uncovered difficult truths they had never known. One person reported learning that both of his grandfathers were members of the Nazi Party. Another discovered that a great-grandfather known in the family for his harsh temperament had indeed joined. A different user found records showing that the non-Jewish husband of a Jewish relative became a member in 1933, even though his wife was later killed at the Kulmhof extermination camp.

Christine Schmidt, deputy director of London’s Wiener Holocaust Library, said the database will be extremely valuable for researchers. She called the project an important step in making historical records easier to access and said it can help support accurate scholarship while pushing back against attempts to distort or deny the history of the Holocaust.

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