German political scientist Jürgen Falter has devoted much of his career to studying Nazi party membership records and has written extensively about the rise of Adolf Hitler and his party.
He had previously looked into his mother’s denazification record. The records are kept in Germany’s local national archives and typically include postwar surveys conducted during the Allied-led process after World War II.
He discovered that she had been classified as “innocent,” meaning she was freed from complicity with the regime. If you provided false information on this questionnaire, you could be punished.
So when German newspapers launched a searchable database earlier this year to allow people to check whether their ancestors had been members of the Nazi party, Falter told CNN he was “even more surprised” to discover that his mother’s name had appeared in old party records. Apparently he kept this secret from his family as well.
“Taken together, my mother’s personality as a liberal Catholic, her spirituality, and her political beliefs make it really improbable that she joined the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) in 1940 at the age of 23. However, it is recorded in the card index, which probably indicates that she was indeed a member,” said Falter, a senior research professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
“She never talked about this in her family. If her father, who was engaged to her at the time, had known, he probably would have broken off the engagement, as he was an ardent anti-National Socialist who was imprisoned by the Gestapo.”
Falter’s shocking discovery highlights the extent to which newly accessible archives are reshaping Germans’ understanding of their family history, but also comes at a time when domestic support for the far-right remains high as the country seeks to move past its Nazi history.
Millions of index cards, once restricted by German privacy laws and requiring lengthy procedures to obtain, have been searchable directly online in German media for several months now, after the U.S. National Archives published its existing membership card files online.
“What did your grandparents do during the Nazi era?” the German news magazine Der Spiegel asks its readers. “Find out your family’s NSDAP history here,” Die Zeit implores.
The push for online search engines comes as Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) continues to enjoy strong support. Prominent voices within the AfD reject Germany’s postwar “culture of memory” and argue that Germany should move beyond its history of sin and focus on national pride.
Across the Atlantic, billionaire Elon Musk, then a senior adviser to US President Donald Trump, told an AfD rally last year that the country was “too focused on the sins of the past” and that children should not be held responsible for the “sins of their great-grandparents.”
The new searchable database will work against these demands, encouraging Germans to take a closer look at their own families’ ties to Nazism and prompting new reflections on how extremism was normalized by ordinary citizens.
Records do not indicate why a person might have joined the Nazis. However, researchers say the date a person participated can indicate whether the person was ideologically motivated.
“Before 1933, they were probably more likely to be convicted, but after 1933, after the Third Reich was established, there were a lot of opportunists who joined the party for more selfish reasons: to get a promotion, to get financial benefits, or to protect their families,” Falter told CNN, referring to the year the Nazis came to power. His book “Hitler’s Party Comrades” analyzes the development of Nazi party membership and possible motives for joining the party.
Toward the end of the war, the Nazis wanted to destroy the party’s vast collection of membership cards, taking them to a pulp mill near Munich. They were saved at the last minute by the factory owner, who convinced the arriving American troops of their worth.
Der Spiegel’s search engine has featured prominently on the group’s online homepage in recent weeks, and the outlet said it has received thousands of emails from readers who have found families in the records.
Some experts believe that the database is helping to propel a new phase of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (a word meaning “coming to terms with the past”) in Germany. Germany has gone through several such stages since the end of the Third Reich. But this latest conversation focuses specifically on family memory and challenging the sanitized narratives families may have passed on about what their ancestors did under Nazism.
“For decades, millions of Germans wanted to believe that their families were not involved in Nazi violence, war crimes, and the murder of Jews. Now, 80 years after the war, many are beginning 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 from the end of World War II through the 1960s and 1970s, there were significant efforts at national historical cleansing, including monuments such as Stolperstein, the last known home of Jews and other Holocaust victims, and concrete blocks carved into road pavements across Germany and Europe. However, there was little at the individual or family level.
“Many families in Germany relied on the protective barrier of so-called ‘transmitted memory,’ stories passed down orally from grandparents and parents,” Dach told CNN. “These stories often said that their ancestors were not steeped in Nazism at all.”
He added: “These narratives are in direct conflict with currently available empirical data.”
This phenomenon of story alteration is detailed in the 2002 nonfiction book “Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi.” As a sociological study, the book examines how modern families remember the war and finds a clear disconnect between historical reality and family memory. While younger generations are taught about the atrocities of the Holocaust in schools, the book reveals that family lore continues to sanitize the past, with grandparents often portrayed as heroes, rescuers or victims themselves.
“There’s been silence in families, there’s been stories, there’s been stories that have been whitewashed. I think that’s finally starting to change now, thanks to these search engines,” Duck said.
Another factor is the gradual death of the last generation who lived through the Third Reich, meaning that Nazi crimes have slipped from living memory into history and formal education. This growing distance may make it easier for younger generations to separate family traditions from the realities of the regime.
While there are circumstantial reasons for the findings to be released now, Dack believes the current wave of historical cleansing is also acting as a civil and institutional backlash against the political rise of the far right. The party claimed a massive 20.8% of the vote in last year’s national elections, making it the second-largest party in Germany’s parliament with 152 seats.
“Publicly disseminating these membership files carries a clear institutional warning…and that democratic institutions are fragile and radicalization is a gradual process.”
Falter said it is unclear how the current dialogue will ultimately act as a barrier to Germany’s far-right forces and demands that Germany be free of its Nazi past.
“But this will prompt people to think again about how it is possible that there were so many NSDAP members among our ancestors.”
