By Giovanni Maddalena*
Memorie.al / The well-known German weekly newspaper “Die Zeit”, based in Hamburg, has launched an online site that, using artificial intelligence, manages to read and combine data from Nazi archives, which until now were stored in the United States of America. Thus, with one click, anyone can find out whether their family members, or acquaintances, friends or enemies, were officially part of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party. As CNN reports, one of the most famous researchers of this period, Jürgen Falter, discovered that his mother, a liberal Catholic, although she was married to a person persecuted by the Nazi regime, had been registered in the Nazi Party. This was a secret that she had hidden her entire life. Other media outlets have also published similar stories.
The idea of this page is to correct a situation that has arisen in Germany. While the collective memory and shame for Nazism have been cultivated to the point of excess, even causing adverse 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 hidden or denied, creating the paradoxical situation that 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 the 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 the memory of something deeply wrong, which the majority of people supported, be handled? Should the past be buried in secrecy and moved on? Or is it better to make it public, remembering all those who participated in a collective shame? The first solution has been implemented in Russia; the second is what “Die Zeit” is trying to accomplish.
I believe that both of these solutions are wrong and that both risk producing consequences worse than the problems they aim to solve.
Without a judgment based on truth, there can be no change. Only the truth, even when it is bitter, sets us free, because, as the American philosopher George Santayana said, a past that is not judged is destined to be repeated. Hiding the past and moving forward is the surest path to new and even greater tragedies.
However, the truth must be complete. The initiative of *Die Zeit* presents only part of the truth, without interpretation of the context and without historical analysis. Someone was a member of the Nazi Party, yes; but why? What were the needs, weaknesses or circumstances that prompted him? Why did so many people join? Why precisely at that historical period?
Part of the truth is never the whole truth, as the writer Vasily Grossman teaches us. Even in this case, the material fact of party registration does not tell the whole story. 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 is also true: joining the Nazi Party may have had very different reasons and methods than ideological conviction. Of course, it is good to talk about evil. To close the dark pages, both personal and collective, there is no other way than honest dialogue, memory and judgment.
But this judgment must take into account as many factors as possible, including the reasons why, at the time, many ordinary people considered what we now know to be bad to be good. In this case, for example, the use of archives is positive, but perhaps a limited access to family members only, accompanied by an explanatory historical introduction, would have been a more humane and effective solution.
*Professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Bologna
Translated by Dr. Zhirjar Mokini
Paris, August 30, 2026/Memorie.al
