Where the records come from
Mass-membership parties kept meticulous card files. Several survived the war; few are digitized. This is our honest map of what exists and what it takes to reach it.
Germany
In this demoNSDAP membership registers — the party's central (MFKL) and regional (MFOK) card files: ~12M surviving cards covering ~10.2M people, about 90% of all 1925–1945 memberships. Seized by the US Army in 1945, microfilmed at the Berlin Document Center, digitized and published by the US National Archives in 2026. Public domain, bulk-downloadable.
The same dataset already covers Austria (Ostmark Gaus — Salzburg and Vienna files were destroyed) and the Sudetenland (Sudeten Germans entered the NSDAP in October 1938). No extra pipeline needed.
NARA series 12044361 · Bundesarchiv (originals, German protection periods apply)
Norway
Digitized, freeNasjonal Samling membership registers — the party peaked at ~44,000 members in 1943, and its registers survived intact. They sit on Digitalarkivet, the Norwegian National Archives' free publishing platform, alongside the post-war treason-trial files.
The best second country: tiny corpus, free bulk access, English-language interface, and a strong genealogy market.
Italy
Partnership neededPNF central member card index ("schedario degli iscritti") — held at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome and cataloged online. Some provincial federations published their own member databases (Turin, 2013).
The national file is incomplete — much was lost in 1943–45 — and access is a partnership conversation, not a scrape.
Hungary
Partnership neededArrow Cross member card index — the card index of party members survived the war in state-security custody and now rests in the Hungarian National Archives (MNL, collection P 1351). Captured Arrow Cross records also sit at NARA (RG 242, microfilm T973) and at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Archive-tier access; Hungarian digitization is partly commercial (Arcanum).
Poland
Different record typeAn occupied country — no domestic mass party. The analog is the Deutsche Volksliste: the German classification lists that registered ethnic Germans (and Poles pressured to register) in the annexed west. Held by IPN branches, partly online. Registration was often coerced — read with care.
Victim side: straty.pl, IPN's free database of 5.5M people repressed under the German occupation.
Reading these records
- Membership is not guilt. Mass parties counted millions — volunteers, conformists, and the coerced. The joining date and context matter; we show documents, not verdicts.
- Absence is not disproof. Every national file has wartime losses; a missing record proves nothing.
- Victim and survivor records live in separate archives: the Arolsen Archives (40M+ documents, free) and Yad Vashem's names database.