A few days ago, I met my neighbor, who I know is a reader of the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit. I greeted her and she responded with a smile.
I said: Have you browsed the last issue?
She replied: Of course.
I asked: Did anything out of the ordinary catch your attention?
She replied: No.
I said: Die Zeit now offers a special service to readers that enables them to research the Nazi past of their families?
She smiled again and, most likely, she knew what I wanted and said, “Look… compared to other German families, we know our family’s history well and we know that it was divided like all German families at that time. My father even refused to attend his brother’s wedding because he was a member of the Nazi Party and he did not hesitate to brand him with the common insult “Nazi pig,” while other relatives did not care to publicly declare their affiliation to this party, and sometimes even bragged about it.”
This sharp division in my neighbor’s family is not a special case, but rather it included most German families, according to historian Frank Beauer, “My family was also divided and remained so even after 1945 (the end of World War II). I did not discover the number of my grandfather’s brothers and sisters except through a photo of a distant relative’s wedding. It later became clear to me that the relatives who were linked to the Nazis joined the police and intelligence services in East Germany after the war, while relatives who during the Nazi era chose leftists.” Specialization in humanities.
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Origin of the story
But what drives this newspaper to dig up the past in this way? Doesn’t this pose a threat to the cohesion of the backbone of society – the family – in these turbulent times, as members of the same household engage in stagnant moral debates about Germany’s dark past? Doesn’t the German proverb say, “Don’t wake sleeping dogs”?
The newspaper quotes historian Bayor as saying that it is expected that these discussions will result in intimidation or media excitement, and some right-wing extremists on social media may boast of the history of their Nazi ancestors, but the benefits that this openness will bring are far greater than the side effects, and if this step will spark a debate in public opinion, that is a welcome matter.
Regardless of these and other questions, it seems that Die Zeit preceded other major media outlets in providing this service to its readers, because the origin of this story is the US National Archives’ release last March of 10 million digitized membership cards in the German Nazi Party and publishing them on the Internet.
Since then, according to identical media outlets, the site has recorded more than a million visits, because publishing these cards motivated people to search for their relatives and to compare the “new discoveries” with stories and questions they passed down from their fathers and grandfathers. Some of them are trying to answer the question: “Was my grandfather a Nazi? Did he join the Nazi Party out of conviction or was he forced to do so?”
The newspaper says that searching for family members in the German Federal Archives was not easy in the past, and the archive site sometimes crashed due to pressure, but now, after the American National Archives digitized this large number of cards, the newspaper has provided 4.5 million cards and later 8.2 million other cards, which means the ability to find 90 percent of the members of the Nazi Party.
“We didn’t know”
When Germany discusses the part related to the role and support of the masses for the Nazi Party or the reasons why more than 10 million people joined this party, a common saying is “We did not know.” Is this true?
In general, the following applies regarding whether Germans knew or did not know about the crimes of the Nazi Party: “No one was forced to join the Party, even if this was repeatedly claimed after the end of the war, and no one could become a member unwillingly or without knowledge.”
When Germany discusses the part about the role and support of the masses for the Nazi Party or the reasons why more than 10 million people joined the Nazi Party, a common saying is “We didn’t know.”
Die Zeit provides a vivid example of this by saying that the current German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, stated in 2024 that his grandfather, Joseph Paul Savini, who joined the party in 1937, was not aware of his membership. This applies to other celebrities, such as the comedian Dieter Hildebrand or the writer Martin Walser. They all said that they were not aware of their membership in the party, despite the later revelation of the opposite, as historians agreed that no member was accepted without his personal signature and in writing. His hand.
But the newspaper goes further in refuting the saying: “We did not know” and adds by asking more questions: How did the number of Nazi Party members develop over the years? At what stages did the party witness a strong turnout? What does this reveal about the motivations of the more than 10 million people who joined it?
The Nazi Party actually emerged in 1920 from the German Workers’ Party, which was founded in 1919. After the attempted coup led by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1923, the party was banned before it was re-established in 1925.
At first, the party grew very slowly and was so small that it was of little importance and in 1932 it became the largest force with 37.4 percent of the vote.
On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, after which the Nazis began to eliminate opposition parties by force of arms and to reconstitute the state. After that, the demand to join the party was so great that a ban was imposed on accepting new members, as the party bureaucratic apparatus was no longer able to absorb new members, and Hitler aimed not to flood it with opportunists.
Starting in 1937 – the newspaper quotes historian Jürgen Walter – the ban was gradually lifted, and in 1942 a new ban was imposed with the aim of reducing the number of opportunistic members in it. After that, only specific groups were allowed to join, such as graduates of (Hitler’s Youth Organization) or (German Girls’ League), in addition to the war wounded.
Over the course of more than 20 years, the number of party members exceeded 10.2 million people, and by the end of the war, the party had reached its maximum absorptive capacity, which historian Walter commented on by saying that there was no social class or profession immune to the temptations of Nazism, a conclusion he reached based on an analysis of a sample of 50,000 membership cards.
The groups most represented in the party were self-employed people, civil servants, and government employees, in addition to workers. While traditional workers remained relatively loyal to the Social Democratic and Communist parties, a large number of workers, especially craftsmen, joined the Nazi Party.
Model member
The typical member of the Nazi Party, quoted here from Die Zeit, was mostly young and male, and the category born between 1900 and 1915 formed a large bloc of its members, that is, those who lived through World War I as children or teenagers, and among them were its leaders such as Reinhard Heydrich, who since 1939 headed the Reich Security Office, and Heinrich Himmler, commander of the SS forces.
It was not until after 1933 that a large number of older groups began to join the party, and most of them were likely opportunists trying to adapt to the new regime.
These generations were formed under the influence of deprivation as a result of World War I, anger at Germany’s defeat in this war, and the shock resulting from the revolution and inflation, and all of this was the cause of the extremism of the members of the party, which provided all of these young people with a new political homeland and an alternative to the traditional parties that were not able to provide satisfactory answers to the people regarding the remnants of the war, specifically unemployment.
A large number of older groups did not begin to join the party until after 1933, and most of them were likely opportunists who tried to adapt to the new system. Starting in 1942, the party leadership tried to rejuvenate its members, allowing only graduates of youth organizations to join. It lowered the membership age in 1944 from 18 to 17 years. With the joining of young women from the German Girls’ Organization, the percentage of women in the party increased.
In principle, the reasons that motivated Germans who were not forced to join a Nazi party were varied, including conviction in its ideology, opportunism, nationalist feelings, anti-Semitism, the dream of what was then called a “homogeneous society,” the hope of obtaining a better job, and sometimes fear for the future of the family.
The membership cards that were released only reveal these motives to a limited extent, but the date of joining gives a rough indication that those who joined before 1933 often did so out of conviction, but after 1933 the situation changed and opportunists began to join in large numbers.
After 1945 – Die Zeit criticizes – the Germans viewed themselves as victims of bombing and war, and victims of a hoax fabricated by a ruthless Nazi group. During the exhumation of history in Germany after the war, many denied their involvement in Nazi crimes and, at times, tried to beautify the reality. Silence was often the dominant position in public opinion, in which a state of shame prevailed in front of the pictures of concentration camps that the Allies displayed after the fall of Nazi Germany, and it soon began to be said that crimes had been committed. “In the name of Germany” as a whole.
All the facts have become exposed
The newspaper adds that the publication of this huge data demonstrated that no one can now gloss or deny the membership of prominent businessmen, artists or politicians in the party, as the facts have become exposed to everyone and can be easily verified, and this makes it practically impossible to lie about the Nazi past or ignore it.
However, simply possessing a party membership card does not necessarily mean that the member was a criminal, murderer, or beneficiary of the Nazi regime, but rather there is likely not a single German family in which there was not someone who was a member of the party, as well as belonging to other Nazi regime organizations or the army.
It is said that this denial and silence were broken during the sixties of the last century in the context of a generational conflict that Germany experienced in all its details. This is partly true, but it is also true that a person tends to hide everything that makes him feel ashamed, and what a person hides for a long time may eventually forget.
The newspaper presents the results of a remarkable study it conducted in 2025, saying that 26 percent of Germans say that their families were opposed to Nazism, and that 21 percent of them see their ancestors as mere bystanders, while only 3 percent believe that their families supported the regime. However, Die Zeit adds, given that the party’s membership included more than 10 million people, these results do not correspond to historical reality.
The newspaper concludes by saying, “It is time to break the silence resulting from unjustified shame. Whoever was a member of the Nazi Party was contributing to supporting the regime and legitimizing it. But on the other hand, children or grandchildren cannot be held responsible for what their ancestors did.”
In the context of the newspaper’s encouragement to citizens to search for the history of their ancestors and ancestors, it says that there is nothing preventing them from starting all of this, even more than 80 years after the end of the war, and perhaps writing the family name in our search engine is a first step in this direction.
