Was Your Grandfather a Nazi? NSDAP Membership Now Searchable Online
The US National Archives has made 12 million Nazi membership cards searchable online. The database includes some familiar names.
Thursday, April 9
Between 1925 and 1945, more than 10 million Germans applied for membership of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, aka the Nazis — but until now it was a relatively difficult process to find out exactly who had been a party member and who hadn't. No longer: the US National Archives has made their collection of around 12 million NSDAP membership cards freely available online and fully searchable. The German newspaper Die Zeit has followed up with their own tool for finding out if your grandparent was a Nazi (available to members only.)
Most of the people represented in the files are now dead, but the fact of former Nazi membership still carries weight in Germany, with large numbers of Germans now misremembering — or eliding — elements of their family history. A famous 2002 study found that half of Germans thought their grandparents had disapproved of National Socialism, while only 1% of respondents believed they had held a positive view. In reality, one in five adult Germans had been party members.
In 2004, Merz claimed his grandfather had been enrolled without his knowledge — a statement contradicted by archival evidence.
Nazi ancestors are common among the German political class, much to the discomfort of some of its leading figures.
The grandfather of German chancellor Friedrich Merz, Josef Paul Sauvigny, became a member of the NSDAP in 1937. In 2004, Merz claimed his grandfather had been enrolled without his knowledge — a statement contradicted by archival evidence. Former Greens leader Robert Habeck has been more candid: his great-grandfather belonged to Hitler's innermost circle, and was later convicted as a war criminal – a history Habeck has said shaped his political thinking.
As for the AfD, it may come as no surprise that Alice Weidel's grandfather, Hans Weidel, was a military judge appointed personally by Hitler, who sentenced opponents of the Third Reich. Her colleague Beatrix von Storch has the most extraordinary family history of all: her maternal grandfather, Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, served as Hitler's finance minister throughout the entire Nazi period and was the de facto last head of government of Nazi Germany, convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg in 1949.
The newly digitised membership cards also show exactly which sections of society were more likely to join the party, which drew largely from the middle class. The self-employed, salaried employees, and civil servants were highly represented, while industrial workers, who made up roughly a third of the working population, tended to remain loyal to the social democratic SPD and the communist KPD.
