People can now find out whether their ancestors were members of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party or not, using a new German online search engine, BBC reports.
The tool, NSDAP-Mitgliederkartei, launched by German newspaper Die Zeit in cooperation with archives in Germany and the United States, makes millions of Nazi Party membership cards searchable. The cards, once stored in Munich, were saved from destruction at the end of World War 2 and later played a key role in Germany’s de‑Nazification process.
With Hitler’s Reich collapsing, Nazi officials ordered millions of these party membership cards to be pulped. According to Die Zeit, the trove was rescued by Hanns Huber, director of a nearby paper mill, who later handed them to the Americans.
For nearly half a century, the records were stored at the Berlin Document Center under US control. In 1994, they were transferred to the German Federal Archives, with microfilm copies sent to the US National Archives in Washington DC.
Between 1925 and 1945, around 10.2 million Germans became members of the Nazi Party. Until recently, access to those membership records required formal requests to German authorities. In March, the US Archives began releasing the records online. Die Zeit said it obtained the data and “backed up the documents to make them easily searchable.”
Die Zeit spokesperson Judith Busch said the response has been “overwhelming,” and it 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.” Records showed 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 few times," he told BBC.
Rainer told the BBC 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.”
