Die Zeit’s online database of individuals’ Nazi membership is prompting a reckoning as people uncover ties to regime
O
laf Köndgen is 64 years old, a German citizen and a senior European human rights expert who has lived and worked in France for several years. Last month, Köndgen learned that he is also the son of a Nazi.
Despite a strong interest in history and its lessons, Köndgen is typical of many 21st-century Germans in having had only the roughest outlines of his own family’s complicity with Hitler’s regime.
That began to change in early April, when the newspaper Die Zeit launched an online search engine for the vast archives of the National Socialist German Workers’ party (NSDAP), making information about individuals’ Nazi membership easily accessible for the first time.
