German political scientist Jürgen Falter has devoted much of his career to studying Nazi membership records and has written extensively on the rise of Adolf Hitler and his party.
He had previously looked up his own mother’s denazification records, which are kept in local state archives in Germany and typically contain post-war questionnaires taken during the allied-led process that followed World War II.
He found that she had been classified as “exonerated,” meaning she was cleared of complicity in the regime. A false statement on this questionnaire could have resulted in punishment.
So, when German newspapers earlier this year launched…