The Nazi Party's Membership List Is Now a Search Box

It Only Took 32 Years — Since I First Wrote About It, and Asked for It

Somewhere in Germany this morning, someone typed a family name into a search box and learned, in about the time it takes to read this sentence, that a grandfather or a great-uncle had once carried a Nazi Party membership card. It is happening millions of times over. For eighty years the plain fact of who actually joined Hitler’s party lived in millions of paper cards that almost no one could reach. This year, at last, it became searchable online — and almost immediately a fight broke out over who is allowed to use it.

I have a particular reason to write about this now. In 1994 Trisha Posner and I spent time inside the Berlin Document Center vault where those cards were kept, and I reported on them for The New Yorker. I argued that a record this important should be open to everyone. It has taken thirty-two years for that to come close to happening — and in the end it took a German newspaper and artificial intelligence, not any government, to do it.

The piece I published then, “Secrets of the Files,” …