The United States National Archives (NARA) recently released online the nearly complete administrative history of millions of members National Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (NSDAP), as well as people who were - officially - connected with the Nazi regime in other ways.
About 16,3 million digital objects are available on more than 5.500 digitized microfilms, dated between 1927 and 1945, writes DW.
This huge corpus of documents can be explored by anyone for the first time - for free and without any registration.
The documents contain name and surname, date and place of birth, place of residence, occupation and other biographical information. It's mostly about men - to the Germans, but also to Austrians, as well as to persons of German origin in other countries (Volksdeutsche).
The material includes three basic categories: membership in the NSDAP, membership in professional associations that the NSDAP promoted or was affiliated with (such as teachers' or doctors' chambers), as well as the activities of the National Socialist judiciary.
Why is this important?
More than eight decades after the Second World War, the generation that actively participated in it and survived it has almost disappeared. Nevertheless, in Germany and Austria, a "wall of silence" remained behind her - both in families and in the public.
The huge rush to the website of the US National Archives, which is therefore often overloaded and temporarily unavailable, shows that interest does not fade with time - on the contrary.
While the children of the war generation, out of loyalty or because of trauma, often respected that silence, today's grandchildren are ready to break it. Publishing the archives gave that generation a kind of "digital excavator" to break the wall of silence.
The headlines that flood the media, like the one in the most circulated newspapers - "Was my grandfather a Nazi?" - are not just sensationalism, but an obvious reflection of the collective need for the truth.
History is no longer the property of closed archives, accessible only to experts and journalists.
How many Nazis were there in Germany and Austria?
According to the German Historical Museum, in 1945 one in five German adults was among the total of 8,5 million members of the NSDAP, thus at least formally supporting the Nazi system.
"Membership in the Nazi Party was a mass phenomenon," says historian and journalist Sven Felix Kellerhoff, author of a 2017 book on the NSDAP.
"If we also take into account mass Nazi organizations such as the mandatory German Workers' Front, the National Socialist People's Aid, Hitler's youth and the National Socialist Women's League, their party structures numbered approximately 69 million members in 1939. However, due to frequent double and multiple memberships, it is impossible to determine exactly what part of the then almost 80 million inhabitants was included in the system. Well-founded estimates say that it is at least 50 percent of the population," Kellerhoff wrote for Welt newspaper.
According to the estimates of the Documentation Center of the Austrian Resistance, almost 700.000 Austrians were members of the NSDAP - about ten percent of the population at the time.
Officially, after the war, 540.000 members were registered, but it is assumed that a large number remained off the record because part of the documentation was destroyed.
However, a significant part of the material was preserved - including the Viennese files, which were not destroyed only because the heating system in the Parliament building was overloaded, where the material should have been burned, writes the Austrian daily Standard.
Where are NSDAP membership data stored?
The NSDAP was founded on February 24, 1920 in Munich, under the name of the German Workers' Party (DAP). Among the founders of the party was Adolf Hitler, who was still Austrian at the time and who soon took over the leadership and turned it into a mass movement.
The office of the Reich Treasurer (Reichsschatzmeister) had administrative authority over the membership. This central institution, with more than 3.200 employees, was responsible for party finances and maintaining a central membership register. It was located in Munich, and from 1929 until the end of the war in 1945, it was led by Franz Xaver Schwarz, who answered only to Hitler.
At the end of the war, the central register contained more than ten million membership cards, according to the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism.
How did the Nazi archives get into American hands?
The survival of NSDAP members' files is owed to Hans Huber, the director of a paper factory near Munich, who, towards the end of the war, defied orders to destroy the documents - a total of 65 tons of paper.
Huber later testified that he hid the files under piles of scrap paper. Thanks to this, today it is estimated that only about 20 percent of the construction was lost.
In October 1945, the documents were transferred in 20 trucks to the newly established Berlin Documentation Center (BDC), which was then under American administration. There, the documents were sorted and microfilmed.
They were handed over to the German Federal Archives only after the reunification of Germany in 1994. The United States has retained microfilm copies - the very ones that are now publicly available in digital form.
The myth of "automatic membership" in the party
Given that over the decades there has been a lot of misinformation - which is not uncommon even today - about how to become a member of the NSDAP, the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) has published a precise explanation of the procedure on its website.
Namely, if information were to reach the public that some influential figure or politician in post-war Germany was a member of the NSDAP, it would generally be denied first. This would be followed by the claim that these persons were enrolled without their knowledge or "automatically", for example through the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend).
However, the archive clearly states that all registered members - without exception - had to personally sign the membership application.
Only adults were allowed to join the party. Exceptions were introduced only in January 1944 for members of the Hitler Youth born in 1926 and 1927, while cases born in 1928 were documented extremely rarely.
According to the data of the German government, there were 27 former members of the NSDAP in the post-war federal governments of West Germany.
The highest office was held by Kurt Georg Kiesinger (CDU), who from 1966 to 1969 was the chancellor of Germany at the head of the CDU and SPD coalition. In Kiesinger's government, in addition to him, as many as nine ministers were members of the NSDAP. He was born in 1904 and was a member of the NSDAP from 1933. From 1940 to 1945 he worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hitler's Germany. After the war, he became a member of the CDU, from 1958 to 1966 he was the Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg. and from 1967 to 1971 the president of the CDU.
Among the 26 federal ministers of post-war Germany who were former members of the Nazi party is, for example, former foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. He was born on March 21, 1927, and became a member of the NSDAP in 1944. Genscher spent a total of 23 years as a federal minister, serving under chancellors Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl.
Why didn't Germany release the documents?
Although the files are publicly available in the US, searching them requires a lot of patience. Some media outlets have since published detailed instructions for searching microfilms, as well as an app to help with this.
Until now, it has been possible to research these documents in Germany as well, but the procedure is carried out indirectly, with the submission of an official request and the obligatory assistance of an archivist. Answers are often waited for weeks or months, and research can involve some costs.
An important difference is that the research of persons with whom the applicant is not related is possible only for experts.
According to German law, personal data can only be made public ten years after a person's death or 100 years after their birth.
The Federal Archives processes around 75.000 requests a year regarding persons connected to the NSDAP, the Wehrmacht and other organizations, its spokesman Elmar Kramer told the Bavarian Public Service. He estimates that NSDAP records could become available online only in the coming years, at the earliest in early 2028.
