A German political scientist who spent his career studying Nazi Party membership records made a personal discovery he ne...

A German political scientist who spent his career studying Nazi Party membership records made a personal discovery he never expected: his own mother's name was in the archives. Jurgen Falter, a senior research professor at Johannes Gutenberg University, had previously searched postwar questionnaires about his mother and found she had been cleared of any charges related to the regime. But when German newspapers recently launched searchable databases of Nazi Party membership files, her name appeared in the old card index records. She had apparently joined the NSDAP in 1940, at age 23, and never told anyone in the family. Falter described the finding as something he considered "more than astonishing," saying it was "unthinkable" given his mother's identity as a liberal Catholic. He added that if his father had known at the time, being a committed opponent of National Socialism who had been imprisoned by the Gestapo, he would almost certainly have ended the engagement. The databases now being published by outlets including Der Spiegel and Die Zeit were made possible after millions of card index files, previously held under strict German privacy laws, were released by the US National Archives. The Nazis had tried to destroy the collection in the final days of the war by moving it to a factory near Munich, but the factory's owner alerted American forces in time to save it. Der Spiegel says it has already received thousands of messages from readers who found relatives in the records. Researchers note that the date of membership often reveals a great deal. Falter explained in his book "Hitler's Party Comrades" that those who joined before 1933 were likely true believers, while the post-1933 wave included large numbers of opportunists who signed up for promotions, financial gain, or to protect family members. The databases are reshaping how Germans understand their family history, with some historians describing it as a new phase of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the German concept of coming to terms with the past. For decades, families relied on oral histories insisting their relatives had no connection to Nazism. The official records are now telling a different sto...