Site of the Month

Full disclosure, I have not used the site featured today. Two things are pretty much stopping me: 

1. It's a pay site. Though it doesn't look like a lot of money is involved. 

2. I don't speak or read German. 

Maybe 2 doesn't apply as much once you're into the Die Zeit.  The home page is mixed German and English. But if I'm intuiting well, I'm guessing it says four searches for one Euro. As I don't know the conversion rate to U.S, I don't know if that is a good deal or not. 

But you're asking yourself - "four searches......for what.....".  Well, I'll take the text right off the page for you: 

Were any of your relatives – your father, your grandmother or your great-grandfather – members of the National Socialist Germany Workers' Party, the Nazis? Until recently, that question could only be answered by submitting a request to the German Federal Archives, or currently through the website of the U.S. National Archives, which has made its microfilm copies of the NSDAP membership index available online over the course of the past year. Finding individual people there, however, is nearly impossible, and the site itself has repeatedly been unreachable due to the surge of traffic triggered by the news of its publication. DIE ZEIT therefore secured the complete dataset and subjected it for the first time to comprehensive processing and a statistical analysis. In an initial step, we were able to make approximately 4.5 million index cards from the Nazi era directly searchable. Now, following an update, an additional 8.2 million documents can be searched by name and place of birth of individual persons.

Shortened version: was anyone in your family a Nazi. 

It's kind of a daunting thing. I mean, who wants that really, let alone to know it or be burdened with said knowledge? It's not like you can use it in an ice breaker. 

Still in this day and age, where some people thing being a Nazi isn't / wasn't so bad, maybe it is ok to not bury our heads to that. If nothing else, the Nazi's kept excellent records, so I'm guessing what is there is pretty fucking accurate. 

Am I worried about finding my family there?  No. Not really. My father's family emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1800s, my mother's around 1900. Anyone left behind would have been more worried about getting a gold star and some ink. 

But fuck if my searches wouldn't be people in the current administration, because you just know........

I won't lie, I'm curious, but ugh - money. Just make it free.