In March, the US National Archives opened online access to documents on members of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. Some of these materials, which the Nazi authorities had tried to destroy at the end of World War II, survived, came under US control and were later transferred to the Berlin Documentation Center. After that, Die Zeit launched a search tool to check party membership; about 1.5 million people used it in the first month.
Estimates say roughly 10.2 million citizens of the Reich belonged to the Nazi Party during the dictatorship. The published databases contain records on 4.5 million people from the central card index and 8.2 million from local archives; the sets overlap in part and together cover about 90% of party card holders. As the publication notes, not all of them were direct participants in Nazi crimes: many joined for career advancement and privileges.
Berlin journalist Juliana Bardolim said that the opening of the Stasi archives after German reunification was a painful experience for the former East Germany: people learned that spouses, friends and neighbors had informed on them. That led to broken relationships, job losses, isolation and even suicides. At the same time, she said, many people did not want to read their files because they feared the truth.
According to Bardolim, the history of Nazism has long been part of public knowledge in Germany: families and university circles had long discussed which ancestors had belonged to the party, so new disclosures are often received without severe shock.
Researcher of historical memory Nikolai Epple said the German experience is tied to the transition from dictatorship to democracy and to the logic of “never again.” He noted that opening archives can be part of transitional justice along with trials, lustration, compensation and memorialization. In his view, that framework does not apply to Russia, because the country is dealing not with a transition but with a rollback to earlier practices.
Against this background, the publication writes, the Russian state is restricting access to information about Stalinist terror, shutting museums and memorial initiatives, and persecuting those who preserve historical memory. The human rights center Memorial, labeled a “foreign agent” in 2014, liquidated in 2021 and declared an “undesirable organization” in 2026, continued collecting data on repression. Its board member Alexander Cherkasov said access to documents could be reconstructed only indirectly, while public demand for such information exists but will fully emerge only if the archives are opened.