By Giovanni Maddalena*
Memorie.al– The well-known German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, based in Hamburg, has launched an online page that, using artificial intelligence, manages to read and cross-reference data from Nazi archives, which until now were stored in the United States of America. Thus, with a single click, anyone can discover whether members of their family, or acquaintances, friends, or enemies, were officially part of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. As CNN reports, one of the most renowned scholars of this period, Jürgen Falter, discovered that his mother – a Catholic with liberal convictions – although married to a person persecuted by the Nazi regime, had been registered in the Nazi Party. This was a secret she had kept hidden throughout her entire life. Other media outlets have also published similar stories.
The idea behind this page is to correct a situation that has arisen in Germany. While collective memory and shame about Nazism have been cultivated to excess, even provoking backlash reactions, such as those of today’s far-right parties, family and private memory has followed a different path.
In many families, any connection to Nazism has been concealed or denied, creating the paradoxical situation in which almost no one admits to having been part of a party that, at its peak, had more than 8 million members – about 10% of the German population at that time.
This case is part of a broader problem: how to preserve the memory of tragedies and collective guilt, which affects not only states but also regions, cultures, nations, and even large or small groups of people.
How should memory be handled for something deeply wrong, which the majority of people supported? Should the past be buried by hiding it and moving forward? Or is it better to make it public, remembering all those who took part in a collective shame? The first solution has been implemented in Russia; the second is what Die Zeit is trying to complete.
I believe both of these solutions are misguided and that both risk producing worse consequences than the problems they aim to solve.
Without a judgment based on truth, there can be no change. Only truth, even when bitter, makes us free, because, as the American philosopher George Santayana said, a past that is not judged is doomed to repeat itself. To hide the past and move forward is the surest path toward new and even more severe tragedies.
However, the truth must be complete. The initiative by Die Zeit presents only a part of the truth, without interpretation of context and without historical analysis. Someone was a member of the Nazi Party, yes – but why? What were the needs, weaknesses, or circumstances that drove them? Why did so many people join? Why precisely in that historical period?
A part of the truth is never the full truth, as the writer Vasily Grossman teaches us. Even in this case, the material fact of party registration does not tell everything. Die Zeit rightly notes that the lack of party registration does not necessarily mean that someone was not a Nazi, given the large number of organizations, associations, and structures linked to the regime.
But the opposite also holds true: registration in the Nazi Party could have had very different reasons and modalities from ideological conviction. Certainly, it is good to speak about evil. To close the dark pages – both personal and collective – there is no other path than sincere dialogue, memory, and judgment.
But this judgment must take into account as many factors as possible, including the reasons why, at that time, many ordinary people considered as good what we now know was evil. In this case, for example, the use of archives is positive, but perhaps an approach limited only to family members, accompanied by an explanatory historical introduction, would have been a more humane and more effective solution./Memorie.al
Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Bologna
Translated by Dr. Zhirjar Mokini
Paris, August 30, 2026
