NSDAP membership file: What were the motives for joining the NSDAP?

Almost no one today says: “My grandfather was a staunch Nazi.” Yet those who joined the NSDAP always did so for a specific reason, even if, after the war, they tended to minimize or deny it. The argument is this: joining the National Socialist Party was never a neutral or casual gesture, but the result of very different motivations, often uncomfortable to admit today — and family memory in Germany, even now, tries to remove that discomfort. Harald Welzer, a sociologist, has collected testimonies like this: "After all, he wasn't a Nazi, but of course he joined the party." This is the statement of a woman speaking about her brother, and it reveals a blind spot that runs through entire generations. No one recognizes themselves as guilty; everyone claims a position of innocence or, at most, passivity. But the numbers tell a different story. In a survey conducted for Die Zeit in March 2025, only 3% of respondents said that the majority of their family was in favor of Nazism. 21% see them as mere "followers," and 26% even see them as opponents. Yet, 11% think that someone in their family participated in Nazi crimes, while as many as 58% are convinced that their grandparents or relatives were never guilty of anything. Behind these figures lies a mechanism of collective denial: the tendency to see the blame as always lying elsewhere. There were many reasons for joining the NSDAP: of course, there were those who were driven by ideology — anti-communism, the cult of the leader — but many others joined for much more concrete and less noble reasons. There were those who were looking for a job, those who hoped for economic benefits, those who wanted to feel important or simply belong to a strong group. A human detail that is often forgotten: many people joined out of a pure hunger for recognition, not out of political conviction. This does not erase responsibility; on the contrary, it complicates it. Today, in German families, the prevailing narrative is that of "inherited innocence": my grandfather was just a cog in the wheel, not an executioner. But we forget that even those who simply "go with the flow" contribute to making it a river. No one wants to be the villain in their family's story, but historical research forces us to ask ourselves: if everyone is innocent, who did the wrongdoing? A point that is often overlooked is that public and private memory almost never coincide. The archives, statistics, and testimonies tell a different story from the one passed down around the dinner table. The phrase that sticks in your mind is this: no one who joined the NSDAP was truly innocent — every membership card was a choice, even if no one wants to remember it today. If this perspective has made you look at your family history differently, you can indicate it on Lara Notes with I'm In: it's the gesture that says this question is now mine. And if you talk about it with someone in a few days — perhaps by telling how your family remembers the past — on Lara Notes you can use Shared Offline to tag those who were there and pin that conversation. This was from Süddeutsche.de, and it saves you precious minutes of reading.