Visitors to Sachsenhausen, a Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, arrive for a ceremony on Sunday to mark the 81st anniversary of the camp's liberation.Markus Schreiber/The Associated Press
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.
Where once the archival search process was laborious – an easy reason (or excuse) not to investigate one’s own family – this tool changes that.
As a friend who learned her Oma had joined in 1937 wrote to me last week: “Disturbing revelations – in seconds.”
I’m not identifying my friend; having Nazi grandparents remains a taboo. But others are coming forward with their stories.
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Bernard von Schulmann, who lives in Victoria, has always known his family was “on the wrong side of history,” as he puts it – even though with his name (he didn’t use the “von” for many years) he was often mistaken as Jewish. While he suspected some family Nazi history, he never thought his paternal grandfather would have signed up. But there it was: August von Schulmann joined the party on May 1, 1941.
A surprise, he told me, but even stronger was the sense of disappointment. Still, he wanted to know. “Humans are flawed and our ancestors are flawed and I think it’s better to understand the flawed people they were,” he said. “And when it comes to World War II especially [in] Eastern Europe, ‘flawed’ was the standard for everybody, really.”
Roger Frie, the author of Not in my Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust, says the tool has enormous importance. “There’s always been this focus on collective … responsibility for the Holocaust, whilst at the same time, there has been a hesitation to research [one’s] own family,” he told me from Vienna, where he now splits his time with Vancouver.
A visitor to the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa wears a sticker of a yellow daffodil, a symbol of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.Keito Newman/The Canadian Press
Prof. Frie – a clinical psychologist, historian and philosopher who teaches at UBC and the University of Vienna − points to statistics that show many Germans of his generation, the third generation, believe their grandparents helped victims or were Nazi resisters. A 2025 study commissioned by Die Zeit found that only 3 per cent of respondents believed their family had supported the Nazi regime. Yet more than 10 million people joined the party between 1925 and 1945 – more than one in 10 Germans.
The new tool allows anyone to look up any name – not just family. “No one can now excuse or deny the Nazi Party membership of prominent businesspeople, artists, or politicians,” writes Die Zeit in an editorial. “The facts are out in the open, accessible to everyone, and easily verifiable. Lying about the Nazi past or turning a blind eye to it has become impossible, at least as far as membership in Hitler’s party is concerned.”
Prof. Frie was also shocked by a Die Zeit revelation. He wrote a whole book about his family history, but did not expect his great-uncle, whom he describes as kind and jovial, to have been a party member. “He was one of the early joiners. He joined right in 1933, as a 22-year-old.”
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Prof. Frie, whose next book is about silencing dark histories, believes this initiative is particularly significant given the current political climate, with antisemitism on the rise, including on the far right in Germany.
“It suddenly shifts your perspective. It’s no longer abstract, it’s no longer back there,” says Prof. Frie. Of course, many Germans joined for reasons other than ideology – it was necessary for their job, or they did it out of fear or political expedience. Prof. Frie suggests the membership card can be the beginning of a journey; the next steps are to find out why the person might have joined – and what they did.
Mr. von Schulmann also has thoughts about Die Zeit’s project and contemporary events. “It’s really important right now because what are people going to say in 40 or 50 years about their family in the United States? What did you do to stop Trump?”
Information – though it may be hard to digest, process or even imagine – is power, a lightbulb, a portal. It’s a way in – not just to the past, but to oneself: how to act now, in the world as it is? With whom do you want to align yourself? The future is watching.