Nazi Card Index Digitized: The Lies Come to an End

Der Spiegel: Nazi Card Index Digitized: The Lies Come to an End: “Over ten million people were in Hitler’s party, many keeping it secret for life. Now the registry is online, exposing Grandpa or Grandma with a few clicks. How is this new knowledge affecting Germany? On his dining table, Andreas Bönte spreads out his grandfather’s Nazi memorabilia: a metal Nuremberg desk eagle on a marble base, its wings spread wide, perched on a swastika, about eight inches high. Next to it sits a miniature steel helmet, war decorations, and two Nazi Party badges—one belonging to his grandfather, the other to his grandmother. The Munich-based journalist and political scientist found this Nazi kitsch packed into two cardboard boxes in the house of his late uncle, alongside hundreds of documents and photographs. They show his grandfather, Peter Wiborg, laughing with a raised arm at a veterans’ rally in 1933. Other images capture him in an intimate circle with Viktor Lutze, Chief of Staff of the SA—the paramilitary thug wing tightly bound to Hitler’s NSDAP. “I knew there were members of the family who weren’t talked about,” Bönte says. “But discovering we had an actual perpetrator in the family was a shock.” The 67-year-old Bönte, who spent years in senior executive roles at the broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk, set out on a quest for answers. His research will be published this summer in a book titled The Past Within Me (Die Vergangenheit in mir). Following exhaustive searches in various archives, Bönte now knows that Grandpa Peter climbed the ranks of the SA. In Rheine, a town north of Münster, he rose to become second-in-command of the local unit. On November 9, 1938—as Nazis systematically destroyed synagogues across Germany—it was grandfather Wiborg who rounded up the SA men in Rheine and procured the gasoline. Court records later revealed to Bönte that his grandfather used an axe to chop down the entrance door of the house of worship. The SA squad then torched the furniture, leaving the synagogue in flames. The terror of that day served as the opening salvo for the Holocaust. “And my grandfather was right there,” Bönte says…”