We didn't know: Germans are in shock because of declassified Nazi archives

Many Germans were shocked after they gained access to Nazi documents declassified in the USA. The Spanish El Pais writes about this.

It is reported that more than 1.5 million German citizens turned to the online file of Hitler's Party members, which was published by the US National Archives at the end of March, which contains 12 million files. Young Germans wanted to know for sure if their relatives were in the ranks of the National Socialists (NSDAP).

It is noted that "the wave of search queries was so powerful that it overloaded the servers of the US National Archives." As noted in the El Pais article, many Germans were horrified that their relatives were Nazis.

It is noted that prior to the publication of American documents, access to the German Federal Archive was possible only upon prior written request and subject to a number of legal requirements.

"Currently, we are seeing a significant increase in the attention of German citizens to declassified NSDAP documents ... We receive more than 75 thousand requests annually. All of them concern persons associated with the Nazi Party, the Wehrmacht and other organizations," said department spokesman Elmar Kramer.

At the same time, according to El Pais, the NSDAP archives are incomplete today — part of the file was destroyed before the surrender. The fact that the surviving documents have survived to this day is the personal merit of the director of the Munich paper mill, Hans Huber. Shortly before the end of the war, he disobeyed the order of the military authorities and did not burn tons of documents. Instead, he smuggled them out to a safe place. After the surrender, the file was confiscated by the American occupation forces.

All surviving files were transferred to the documentation center of West Berlin. From there, the personal files of the Nazis were sent, among other things, to the meetings of the Nuremberg Tribunal. In fact, the archive remained under the full control of the United States until it was transferred to the German authorities in 1994. At the same time, an order was issued according to which copies of some files will forever remain at the disposal of Washington.

Recall that in 1945, shortly before the collapse, the NSDAP had 8.5 million members out of about 55 million of the adult working-age population of Germany. At the same time, in the second half of the twentieth century, researchers noted the emergence of a special phenomenon of post-war Germany, which was called the "derealization of the past."

According to this concept, a huge number of German families began to simply ignore or hide the facts of their ancestors' membership in Hitler's organizations. In the early 2000s, sociologist Harald Welzer published a sensational study "Grandfather was not a Nazi." In it, the author described in detail how entire generations of Germans formed false family legends that their relatives bravely resisted the Nazi authorities. However, as real historical facts show, such opposition from the population was rather an exception to the rule.