Until recently, establishing whether a family member had belonged to the NSDAP required contacting the German Federal Archives. That changed after the U.S. National Archives made available copies of microfilms containing records on Nazi Party membership.
Using that material, Die Zeit secured the full dataset, processed it and built its own search engine in cooperation with archives in Germany and the United States.
The tool initially allowed searches of about 4.5 million index cards from the Third Reich period. After an update, it expanded to include another 8.2 million documents.
The search engine makes it possible to find membership cards in both the central and regional databases, although reliable identification requires precise details, especially a relative’s date and place of birth.
Between 1925 and 1945, about 10.2 million Germans joined the NSDAP. Their details were kept in two parallel card indexes that were supposed to be destroyed at the end of the war.
About 50 tons of documents were transported from the party headquarters in Munich to a paper mill in the Freimann district, but destruction was prevented by local worker Hanns Huber, who recognized the significance of the material and handed it over to the Americans.
After the war, the cards played an important role in Germany’s denazification process. They were kept for nearly half a century at the Berlin Document Center, and in 1994 were transferred to the German Federal Archives, while microfilm copies went to the U.S. National Archives in Washington.
Die Zeit said the response to the launch had been enormous, with millions of page views and thousands of shares.
(jh)
Source: PAP