The Nazi files shedding new light on family secrets
Party membership records are now searchable online. But, as many Germans are finding out, the archive poses more questions than it answers
Last year, I sat with my grandmother in her care home in Germany, and we shuffled through some old photographs she kept in a shoebox. Between sepia wedding pictures and the fading faces of long-deceased great-uncles, I found a snapshot I have not forgotten since. It showed my grandmother as a little girl smiling into the camera, strands of her wavy hair escaping from under a military cap on which you can just about make out the emblem of an eagle clutching a swastika.
My grandmother must have been about six or seven when she dressed up in her father’s uniform of Nazi Germany’s armed forces, the Wehrmacht. This might have been the last time she ever saw him. He was sent to the Eastern Front and died in 1945 in a prisoner-of-war camp in present-day Poland. Today, she has almost no memories of him. I tried to imagine the man whose uniform seemed so at odds with his young daughter’s smile on that photograph. Was my great-grandfather a Nazi, a reluctant conscript or something in between?
Like many Germans born after the second world war, I have only the haziest of notions of my ancestors’ lives in Nazi Germany. My grandparents were children in 1945. Most of the stories they told me were based on what their surviving parents told them, and that was very little. In the immediate postwar era, most Germans — East and West — were keen to leave the past behind and regard 1945 as Stunde Null or zero hour. By the time their children and grandchildren began to ask questions, it was often too late.
There is a paradox in German memory culture: while most Germans know a lot about the general history of the Nazi era due to the focus on it in education, we tend to know less about our own family stories. Most of us never quite found the time or the inclination to start digging around in our personal backgrounds. After all, broad, ready-made explanations for what happened existed. The silence of those who lived through the Nazi era, combined with the emergence of national narratives taught in schools and museums in the postwar decades, allowed for a degree of personal detachment from this dark and terrifying history. But that’s changing drastically now. As the 1930s and 1940s are sliding out of living memory, a potent mix of renewed interest and easier access to sources is transforming the ways Germans think about their history.
At the beginning of April, the newspaper Die Zeit launched an online tool that allows anyone to search the fully digitised records of the Nazi Party or National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), as Adolf Hitler’s organisation was officially called. In May, another prominent newspaper, Der Spiegel, followed suit. In theory, this information isn’t new. The physical membership cards are held at the German Federal Archives and can be accessed by application. As a historian, I have done this for research, but it never occurred to me to look for family members among the rank and file of the Nazi Party.
The breakthrough moment for the general public came outside of Germany. The US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has microfilm copies of the membership cards and made them accessible online earlier this year. Aided by AI, Die Zeit and Der Spiegel then processed the information on more than 12mn membership cards and created searchable, user-friendly interfaces. Now anyone can enter the details of any person and see whether there is an NSDAP membership card with their name on it.
When the news broke, so many people tried to access the NARA website that it crashed. By the end of April, more than 1.5mn people had accessed their digitised records. Die Zeit also reported “millions of visits” for its search engine. Buoyed by the enormous interest from the German public, Der Spiegel ran a cover story under the headline “Was grandpa a Nazi” and invited prominent German politicians to reveal what they found out about their fathers and grandfathers and how they felt about it.
Renate Künast, a veteran member of the Green Party and former minister for agriculture, wrote that she used the search engine “almost immediately because I’d long wanted to know if one of my ancestors was in the NSDAP.” She found that her father Willy Künast joined in 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor. “It wasn’t a shock,” she admitted, “but it still hit me and has occupied my thoughts ever since.”
Künast can’t remember as a young woman ever asking her father whether he was in the Nazi Party and suspects that if she had, it might have earnt her a slap rather than an answer. “After the war my family was like so many others,” she mused, “a cartel of silence.” Her father died in 1995 and took his story to his grave. Künast used the search tool to find answers but seems to have come away with more questions: “Why did father join the party? Was he a Nazi by conviction? I don’t know.”
When I typed my great-grandfather’s name and date of birth into the boxes on the screen, my finger hovered over the search button for a moment. Was I about to find out that he was a member of the Nazi Party? If so, what exactly was I going to do with this knowledge? When I finally pressed “search”, I found nothing. I tried my other great-grandparents on both sides of the family with the same result. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised. They were all from working-class backgrounds, a group under-represented in Nazi activism. Many workers were either part of left-leaning movements, ranging from communism to social democracy, or not political at all.
But those are general patterns that verify nothing about an individual. Just as Künast couldn’t tell why her father had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 — around a time when many people did so out of opportunism rather than ideological fervour — I couldn’t tell why my great-grandparents had not joined. My great-grandfathers might still have committed terrible atrocities on the Eastern Front — you didn’t need a party membership card for that. Or they may not have done so. Without further research, information about party membership gives only a limited view of their culpability within Hitler’s regime.
In some cases, this information can even be misleading. Consider the case of Carl Weirich, a stationer who features strongly in my recent book Weimar. Unusually for his social class, he never joined the Nazi Party. But he did temporarily become a “Patron Member” of the infamous SS, donating small sums of money to the organisation that ran the concentration camps. His name does not show up in the search engine, seemingly exonerating him.
Conversely, another member of my book’s “cast”, the hotelier Arthur Schmidt, shows up as Nazi Party member 3,743,593, having joined in 1936. But history rendered him a victim of the regime. Arthur’s wife Rosa was Jewish and was later murdered in Auschwitz. Neither Weirich nor Schmidt fit neatly into the judgments a simple search on the Zeit tool seems to promise.
If used with due consideration and embedded in wider research, the eased access to the Nazi Party files can still be a powerful driver of cultural change. People who lived through the 1930s and 1940s often had no wish to talk, leaving future generations to process this history as an abstract thing, as a story that happened to “the Germans” rather than their own family. The easy-to-use search tools have fuelled a more personal form of interest.
There have been previous attempts by postwar generations to tackle this history, especially in West Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when global student activism merged with German questions of guilt, responsibility and reckoning on campuses from Frankfurt to West Berlin. But that discussion was intensely morally charged as left-leaning students demanded answers from their defensive parents underpinned by the implicit assumption that they would have acted differently in their elders’ stead.
The years that have passed since may allow for more nuance. At the same time, we now live in a world where the rise of far-right parties, especially the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, is prompting more people to look to the past for patterns and explanations of how and why ordinary people turn to radical politics in times of crisis. Perhaps what we are witnessing now, as this history slides further out of personal reach but simultaneously seems to become increasingly relevant, is a new and different kind of interest, driven by a desire to understand first and judge second, to preserve knowledge of what happened and to draw meaningful lessons from history rather than to distance oneself from it.
While access to the Nazi Party register alone cannot provide answers to all the questions postwar generations of Germans have about their ancestors, it’s clearly helped prompt a surge of new questions in the first place. Such increased historical curiosity can only be a good thing. Understanding what drove people to make decisions in the past is the first step towards avoiding the repetition of their mistakes in the present.