Until recently, determining whether someone in the family was a member of the NSDAP required contacting the German Federal Archives. The situation changed after the US National Archives released copies of microfilms with documents related to membership in the Nazi Party.
Over 8 million documents in the database
On this basis, the German weekly “Die Zeit” secured the entire data set, comprehensively processed it and prepared its own search engine in cooperation with archives in Germany and the USA. Initially, the tool enabled searching about 4.5 million index cards from the times of the Third Reich, and after the update it covered another 8.2 million documents. The search engine allows you to find membership cards in both the central and regional databases, although reliable identification requires accurate data, especially the date and place of birth of a family member.
Between 1925 and 1945, approximately 10.2 million Germans joined the NSDAP. Their data was kept in parallel in two files, which were to be destroyed at the end of the war. About 50 tons of documents were transported from the Munich party headquarters to a paper mill in the Freimann district, but their destruction was prevented by Hanns Huber, a local employee who recognized the importance of the materials and passed them on to the Americans.
After the war, the cards played an important role in the denazification process of Germany. For nearly half a century they were kept in the Berlin Documentation Center, and in 1994 they were transferred to the German Federal Archives, while copies of the microfilms were transferred to the American National Archives in Washington.
