Un nuovo strumento di ricerca online in Germania rivela se gli antenati erano membri del partito nazista

“The fact that my great-grandfather was a member of the NSDAP [National Socialist German Workers’ Party] was never part of the family story.” “I have already found two close relatives, contrary to the family legend that nobody in our family was involved. Changing perspective at 71 is an awful shock.” These testimonies, published by *Die Zeit* in its April 9 edition, are among the thousands of letters received by the weekly publication after it made an extremely user-friendly search tool available online on April 2. For the first time, anyone can explore a trove of over 12 million documents, recording most of the Nazi Party memberships of Germans born before 1926, from 1925 to 1945.

The original file consists of millions of membership cards issued by the NSDAP at the party’s main headquarters in Munich or at local branches. Incomplete, the archive was partially saved from destruction in April 1945 by Josef Wirth, a Munich paper manufacturer tasked by the Nazis with disposing of the documents. Recognizing the significance of the collection, he hid the records and later reported his discovery to the American forces, who were occupying the region after the fall of the Third Reich.

In early 1946, the Americans transferred the collection to the Berlin Document Center, a data hub on Nazism, which was handed over to the German national archives in 1994. Since then, the collection had been available for consultation, but only upon submitting an administrative request, subject to data protection laws.

In mid-March, the US National Archives in Washington, which retained a copy of the documents on microfilm, published the entire dataset on its website, without requiring any prior administrative procedure for access. Interest was immediate: The surge in requests was so great that servers are often overloaded, especially since searching for information could be time-consuming for those unfamiliar with archival research.

**Read the full article here:** [**https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/04/14/new-online-search-tool-in-germany-reveals-if-ancestors-were-nazi-party-members_6752420_4.html**](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/04/14/new-online-search-tool-in-germany-reveals-if-ancestors-were-nazi-party-members_6752420_4.html)

How about providing a link to the tool

Edit: It seems this is the place but you have to subscribe to “Die Zeit” to get access [https://www.zeit.de/wissen/2026-04/nsdap-mitgliederkartei-karteikarten-familienmitglieder-suche](https://www.zeit.de/wissen/2026-04/nsdap-mitgliederkartei-karteikarten-familienmitglieder-suche)

Many were Nazi Party Members but that doesn’t mean everyone agreed with Hitlers ideals. Many joined out of fear or were coerced into joining. A lot of Argentina has Nazi ancestors and some Americans do as well even Russia

Surprised that people here don´t know who was in the party of their family members. In my family and as far as I know in most of my friends this wasn´t really a secret. There were so many that it isn´t really something you had to hide.

Is the implication that their grandchildren have some sort of Nazi gene and should be ostracized?

God, the amount of apologists here is incredible.

Aber sie waren doch im Widerstand…

Honestly, does it even matter? Mistakes of the past on your ancestors’ part do not affect your choices, and actions eight decades ago no longer affect the world.

Crazy how this country cannot digitalize their Government but when it comes to ziopleasing they leave Silicon Valley in awe

I don’t need an online tool for that…

We still have the application form somewhere.

Me grandpa was very proud to have a 4 digit partner member number on his batch.

… until March 1933 rolls around and his mother gets bullied by some SA thugs for basically being Catholic. The are was majority protestant.

So my grandpa went to the local party leader to terminate his membership. The party leader explains that my grandpa would better reconsider, else there would be consequences for him at his career in his bank job. So my grandpa stays.

In 1939/40 he gets drafted to the Luftwaffe and serves as a FLAK officer in the area of Stuttgart until end of 1944.

His unit is transferred to the French border to support an attack on the allied forces closing in on the Rhein. It’s an diversionary attack in parallel to the battle of the bulge.

They get beat back and retreat far back into German territory. There he is captured in February 1945. (I do not know how exactly)

He is relieved that they get treated quite nicely by the soldiers and guards of the POW camp. He is very surprised that they get real cake on Sundays.

The good relations to the guards turn sour once the first film documentaries about the liberations of the KZs are shown to both guards and POWs.

He said he felt so deeply ashamed. But there is no way he didn’t know before. The whole region of Stuttgard was dotted with “Arbeitslager”. Small satellite camps of the bigger KZs, designed to provide workers for the industry. Prisoners marching to and from those camps was a daily sight.

He spend two years in the US as POW and had to do farm work all over the US. He passed through French camps twice (on the way there and back) and he never said a good word about them. But about the Americans and the American POW camps he was quite positive.

We need something like that in the US. But for the klan.