Were my grandparents Nazis? Archive in the US may have the answer

‘Were my grandparents Nazis?’ Internet archives help investigate families’ pasts More than 80 years after the end of the Nazi regime in Germany, anyone can search for their ancestors’ past at the United States National Archives. The institute has made available a collection of millions of documents, which can be consulted online. ✅ Follow g1’s international news channel on WhatsApp More than 5,000 digitized rolls of microfilm show the data of 6.6 million Germans who, until 1945, were members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP, its acronym in German), better known as the Nazi Party. But the data is not complete. According to the German Historical Museum, in 1945, “one in five adult Germans was among the party’s 8.5 million members” and thus supported, at least on paper, the crimes committed by Adolf Hitler’s regime. “It seems that, nowadays, it is very attractive for a wider audience to do research on their own on the internet”, says historian Johannes Spohr. “But these sources have actually been available in Germany since 1994 in the Federal Archives. And there you can get a lot more information than just these membership records,” he notes. The problem is that, in Germany, there are protection mechanisms that require information about a person to only be disclosed 100 years after birth or ten years after death. The data is not available online and must be requested in writing. Furthermore, as an individual – unlike the US National Archives – you can only consult the documents if you are looking for relatives. “To this day, the persecuted, the victims, are much more publicly known, including with names and identities. In the case of the perpetrators, the situation is still quite vague,” says Spohr. Witnesses are dying Hitler’s membership record in the Nazi Party has number 1 Georg Goebel/dpa/picture alliance For eleven years, the historian has been helping interested parties investigate the history of their families during Nazism through his research service “Present Past”. He says that the people who come to him are between 20 and 90 years old. “All generations are represented. I think what’s special is that we are now exactly in the transition between communicative memory and cultural memory, where things can rarely be transmitted orally and where it is also rarer to be able to interview people”, he says. “Currently, personal interactions for memory are no longer as common and, therefore, archival research is more relevant.” Nowadays, not only grandchildren do research, but also the fourth generation. “And it often happens that they don’t even get to know the people they’re investigating.” According to one study, more than two-thirds of Germans believe that their ancestors were not perpetrators of Nazism; almost 36% consider family members as victims; More than 30% believe their ancestors helped potential victims of Nazism, for example, by hiding Jews. “These responses stem, in part, more from feelings than from concrete knowledge,” says Spohr. After the war, almost no family maintained the habit of discussing the crimes of Nazism, much less about what role they played in that context. The German culture of memory from the Nazi era is considered exemplary abroad, but “in reality, the culture of memory becomes complicated whenever it becomes concrete, that is, when it actually concerns specific people that one might even know,” says Spohr. “And I think memory also needs to be present where it hurts,” he says. According to him, this does not just refer to the Nazi period itself. “Ultimately, today we deal with myths and distortions that come from the post-war period. You could even say: the denial of post-war guilt.” MORE Goering, Adolf Hitler and Franz von Papen. Standing, from left: Alfred Hugenberg, Werner von Blomberg, Wilhelm Frick, Johann Ludwig Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, Paul Freiherr Eltz von Ruebenach and Franz Beldte AP Photo Document search can provide more clarity. In the files, there are names, date and place of birth, date of accession and membership number. In some cases, the addresses and face photos of registered Nazi Party members are also available. However, these binders do not reveal whether someone was a fanatic, an opportunist, or a follower. Furthermore, only about 80% of these documents have been preserved. Therefore, it is not possible to be sure that a relative was not, after all, an avowed Nazi, just because he does not appear in the file. This is where the actual research begins, says Johannes Spohr. “Of course, there are members of the Nazi Party who, outside the scope of membership, did not commit major crimes, and there are also non-members who participated in cruel acts”, he points out. It is possible, for example, to check if someone joined the party before 1933. “This data could indicate that this person was considered especially committed to the Nazi cause, so to speak. Or if they also held positions. Descendants often know well the steps in someone’s life, but they still don’t know why the person made certain choices, what they thought or felt.” Concrete questions, but not always with answers Adolf Hitler speaks to soldiers in Dortmund, in 1933; In the following years, Germany set in motion a plan to exterminate Jews. Yad Vasehm It doesn’t matter what you discover in the end about your great-grandparents. For Spohr, enlightenment is ultimately a responsibility one assumes towards oneself and towards society. The focus of research continues to be whether ancestors committed violence. But also if there were forced workers on the family property or if they have objects confiscated from Jews during expropriations. “It may happen that little is found, leaving many gaps that leave room for the imagination. And, naturally, it is also possible to come across terrible facts that contradict family narratives”, says the historian. Spohr attributes the growing interest in recent years, among other factors, to the war in Ukraine. People want to know whether their grandfather, as a Wehrmacht soldier in Crimea, just got his truck driving license, as he used to tell his family, or whether he committed atrocities. The advance of the right, especially the AfD party in Germany, also worries many people. “They want to check if perhaps there is a relationship between this rise and the Nazi past that has not been properly addressed – the silence about ideologies that perhaps has repercussions to this day.” Destined for destruction The fact that these Nazi-produced files still existed was not something that could be expected. “At the end of the war, they were destined for destruction. The Nazis wanted to eliminate everything that incriminated them and that could be used by the Allies against them,” says Spohr. This happened thanks to Hanns Huber, the manager of a paper mill in Munich, who had been tasked with destroying the documents. But he disobeyed the order and hid the files under a pile of waste paper. In the fall of 1945, the US military transferred these binders to the Berlin Document Center in West Berlin. They were taken along with other records from the time that were needed to prepare for the Nuremberg trials against war criminals. “The Americans had already tried, in 1967, to hand over the files to the German authorities, but they were only accepted in 1994”, says the historian. “At the time, they interpreted this refusal as a sign that, for Germans, it would be compromising and risky to make these documents accessible – after all, many of the people named there were still active in the job market or held influential positions in politics.” For Spohr, the decision by the US National Archives to make the archives available on the internet is nothing extraordinary. This is basically an administrative step within the ongoing process of digitizing the collection. In Germany, the Federal Archives should only put the material online in 2028, when all legal deadlines for the protection of personal data expire. VIDEOS: most watched on g1

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