Lederman: Find out if your kin were Nazis – in seconds

2026/04/27 1 Comment

Discovering some uncomfortable truths:

…For many descendants of German and Austrian families, it has been easy to hang onto vague family stories of Second World War resistance. Now, it has become easier to disturb that comfortable narrative. 

“Research your family’s Nazi past here,” offers an online resource launched by German newspaper Die Zeit. The publication has downloaded digitized documents released by the U.S. National Archives, which were seized at the end of the Second World War. Subscribers can plug in family names and discover whether relatives were card-carrying members of the Nazi party – and view the actual cards themselves.

This has led to a reckoning – a timely one, even with cards dating back decades. …

Source: Find out if your kin were Nazis – in seconds

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust Tagged with ,

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Andrew blogs and tweets public policy issues, particularly the relationship between the political and bureaucratic levels, citizenship and multiculturalism. His latest book, Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias, recounts his experience as a senior public servant in this area.

One Response to Lederman: Find out if your kin were Nazis – in seconds

  1. Raphael Solomon's avatar Raphael Solomon says:
    2026/04/27 at 07:44

    It’s a bit more complicated than the Lederman article suggests. You click through the ,,die Zeit” article, get to a point where the search begins, but you have to be a subscriber to that paper. If you read German and English, you’ll note that the ,,aktuell auf der Seite des US‑Nationalarchivs, das seine Mikrofilmkopien der NSDAP‑Mitgliederkartei online gestellt hat” (the US National Archives has put Nazi memberships online.)

    This is the correct link: https://catalog.archives.gov/search-within/12044361

    If you put in a moderately common German name (try Ecker), you can click through some records and find when where they joined. There’s quite a bit of difference between joining in 1925 and joining in 1935, in my opinion.

    Reply

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