German political scientist Jürgen Falter has devoted much of his career to studying Nazi membership records and has written extensively on the rise of Adolf Hitler and his party.
He had previously looked up his own mother’s denazification records, which are kept in local state archives in Germany and typically contain post-war questionnaires taken during the allied-led process that followed World War II.
He found that she had been classified as “exonerated,” meaning she was cleared of complicity in the regime. A false statement on this questionnaire could have resulted in punishment.
So, when German newspapers earlier this year launched searchable databases allowing people to check whether their ancestors had been members of the Nazi party, Falter told CNN he was “more than surprised” to discover that his mother’s name appeared among the old party records – a secret she had apparently kept hidden even from her family.
“Given my mother’s entire character, mentality and political convictions as a liberal Catholic, it was actually inconceivable that she would have joined the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) in 1940 at the age of 23. But it is documented in the card index, which indicates that she was probably indeed a member,” said Falter, a senior research professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
“She never mentioned this within the family, and had my father, who was engaged to her at the time, learned of it, he – as an ardent anti-National Socialist who had been imprisoned by the Gestapo – would presumably have broken off the engagement.”
Falter’s shocking discovery underscores the extent to which the newly accessible archives are reshaping Germans’ understanding of their own family histories – but it also comes as support in the country remains high for far-right forces, which have sought to push the country to move past its Nazi history.
Millions of index cards, once restricted by German privacy laws and requiring a lengthy process to obtain, are now directly searchable online in German media, as of a few months ago, after the US National Archives published the surviving membership card files online.
“What did your grandparents do in the Nazi era?” German news magazine Der Spiegel asks its readers. “Research your family’s NSDAP history here,” newspaper Die Zeit implores.
The promotion of these online search engines comes at a time when Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party continues to enjoy strong support. Prominent voices from within the AfD have rejected Germany’s post-war Erinnerungskultur , or “culture of remembrance,” arguing that the country should move past its history of guilt and focus on national pride.
Across the Atlantic, billionaire Elon Musk, at the time a senior adviser to US President Donald Trump, told an AfD rally last year that the country had “too much of a focus on past guilt” and that children should not be held responsible for the “sins of their great-grandparents.”
The new searchable databases work against those calls, encouraging Germans to look more closely at their own families’ association with Nazism and prompting fresh reflections on how ordinary citizens came to normalize extremism.
The records do not give a reason why a person might have joined the Nazis. However, researchers say the date at which a person joined can indicate whether it was ideologically motivated.
“Before 1933, it was probably more likely to have been conviction; after 1933, after the establishment of the Third Reich, there were very many opportunists who joined the party for more selfish reasons: to obtain a promotion, to gain economic advantages, or also to protect a family member, and so on,” Falter told CNN, referring to the year the Nazis took power. His book “Hitler’s Party Comrades” analyzes the development of Nazi party membership and possible motives for joining.
In the final days of the war, the Nazis sought to destroy the party’s vast collection of membership cards and took them to a pulp mill near Munich for that reason. They were saved at the last minute by the owner of the mill, who convinced the arriving American army of their worth.
Der Spiegel’s search engine has enjoyed a prominent spot on the organization’s online homepage for weeks and the outlet said it has received several thousand emails from readers who have found family members in the records.
Some experts believe the databases are helping to drive a new phase of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Germany, a word meaning “coming to terms with the past.” Germany has gone through several such phases since the end of the Third Reich. This latest conversation, however, focuses specifically on family memory and on challenging the sanitized narratives families may have passed down about what their ancestors did under Nazism.
“For decades, millions of Germans wanted to believe their families had not been involved in the violence, the war crimes and the murder of Jews perpetrated by the Nazis. Now, 80 years after the end of the war, many have begun to question taboos and family legends anew,” a Der Spiegel journalist who worked on the project told CNN.
Mikkel Dack, associate professor of German history at Rowan University in the US, said that after World War II and into the 1960s and 1970s, there were significant efforts of historical reckoning at the national level, including memorialization such as the Stolpersteine, concrete blocks engraved into pavements on streets across Germany and wider Europe which mark the last known residence of Jews and other victims of the Holocaust. Yet at the individual and family level, there was little.
“Many German families relied on a protective barrier of what’s often referred to as ‘communicative memory,’ that is stories passed down orally by grandparents and parents,” Dack told CNN. “These stories often said that their ancestors were entirely untainted by Nazism.”
He continued: “These narratives clash directly with the empirical data that is accessible now.”
This phenomenon of altered narratives is explored in a 2002 nonfiction book called “Grandpa wasn’t a Nazi.” The book, which serves as a sociological study, examines how contemporary families remember the war, and it found a stark disconnect between historical reality and family memory. While younger generations were taught in school about the atrocities of the Holocaust, the book found that family lore continued to sanitize the past with grandparents often painted as heroes, rescuers or victims themselves.
“There were silences in the family, there was storytelling, there were whitewashed narratives. I think finally now because of these search engines, that’s changing,” Dack said.
Another contributing factor is the gradual passing away of the last generation with lived experience of the Third Reich, which means Nazi crimes are slipping from lived memory into history and formal education. That growing distance can make it easier for younger generations to separate family lore from the realities of the regime.
Although there are circumstantial reasons why the surveys are being published now, Dack believes that the current wave of historical reckoning also functions as a civic and institutional backlash to the political rise of the far right. The party claimed a significant 20.8% of the vote in last year’s national election, making it the second-largest party in Germany’s parliament, where it has 152 seats.
“The public promotion of these membership files carries a clear institutional warning… And that is that democratic institutions are fragile and radicalization is an incremental process.”
Falter said he does not see how the current conversations will ultimately serve as a barrier against the extreme right in Germany, or against demands that Germany free itself from its Nazi past.
“It will, however, prompt people once again to think about how it could happen that there were so many NSDAP members among our ancestors.”
