A new AI database helps viewers search for Nazi families

This isn’t the far-right “Nazi” of the modern era: we’re talking about an AI-driven database that helps you search for Nazi Party family members by name. These are the original Nazis; the German National Socialists you see get beaten down every time you rewatch “Band of Brothers.”

Prominent German weekly newspaper Die Zeit has taken the German Federal Archives’ entire catalog of 8.2 million NSDAP (Nazi Party) documents and used AI to make the all of the Nazi member rolls publicly searchable. If you know the name of a suspected Nazi family, all you have to do is type it in and scroll through the membership cards.

Before Die Zeit acquired the trove of NSDAP records, the only way to look through Nazi Party documents was either by making a request to the German Federal Archives or looking on the U.S. National Archives website. But even looking online is problematic. The German newspaper says that when the documents were made public, the archives’ website couldn’t handle the influx of traffic and it slowed to a crawl.

The database is far from complete, Die Zeit admits. Some 10.2 million people joined the party between 1925 and 1945. The math doesn’t quite add up. To further complicate the record, the Nazis tried to destroy their extensive records in the final months of World War II. According to the newspaper, the party leadership moved 50 tons of its member records to a paper mill in Freimann, near its headquarters in Munich, to be pulped.

Mill owner Hanns Huber stopped pulping the records when he discovered what the Nazis were trying to do. He handed them off to the Americans, who examined the records and estimated that 44% of the national member rolls survived, along with 77% of the Gau (regional) records. Despite the confusion, destruction, and chaos of the war, experts believe 90% of the names are intact.

But just finding a name doesn’t mean you’ll definitely find your neighbor’s grandpa (or your very elderly neighbor) in the database.

Die Zeit warns that just finding a name isn’t definitive. Sometimes there are multiple records for the same person. In other instances, there are multiple people with the same name. Typing in the name Oskar Schindler (of “Schindler’s List” fame) returns nine pages of records, including photos of many Oskar Schindlers. The only thing most of them have in common (besides being Nazis) is that they all have a Hitler mustache (they really, really loved that mustache).

So be sure to check out their place of birth, occupation, or other identifiable information.

You never know, you might just find a real Nazi living in your neighborhood. Former Nazi concentration camp guard Friedrich Karl Berger was discovered living in Tennessee in 2020. He moved to the United States in 1959 and lived a quiet life, despite receiving his pension from the German government the entire time.

His Nazi history was only uncovered after a trove of index cards were recovered from a sunken wreck at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. he was deported to Germany in 2021.

To learn more about how the data was collected, compiled, and analyzed check out Die Zeit’s english-translated Nazi Party search database.

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