Our search engine takes you to individual membership cards in both the Central Card Index and the Gau (regional) Card Index. Since many members appear in both indexes, multiple cards may be displayed for a single name. To reliably identify individuals, you will need your ancestor’s precise date and place of birth.
Some 10.2 million Germans joined the NSDAP from 1925 to 1945. They were recorded in the indexes kept by both the “Gaus,” as the various regions of Nazi Germany were called, and by the central government. Neither index, however, has survived in whole. Shortly before the end of the war, party leadership had the complete stock of index cards – an estimated 50 tons of paper – removed from the Nazi party headquarters in Munich, known as the Braunes Haus, or Brown House, and brought to a pulp mill in the district of Freimann. But the operator of the mill, Hanns Huber, suspended the destruction of the documents once he realized what had fallen into his hands. In the autumn of 1945, the Americans recovered the valuable records and brought them in early 1946 to the Berlin Document Center, which they built for the purpose. Jürgen Falter, who has conducted extensive research into the party and examined the membership indexes for his authoritative work “Hitler’s Parteigenossen” (Hitler’s Party Comrades), estimates that 44 percent of the Central Index and 77 percent of the Gau Index has survived. DIE ZEIT has found that the first index contains around 4.5 million names while the latter contains 8.2 million names. Taken together, says Falter, around 90 percent of all former NSDAP members can be found.
