Nieman Lab: “In the final days of World War II, as the German Reich collapsed, Nazi officials ordered millions of party membership cards to be destroyed. The vast card index that documented membership across Germany survived largely because a paper mill operator, Hanns Huber, chose to hand the records over to the advancing US forces rather than pulp them. For decades, discovering whether a relative had belonged to the Nazi Party — officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) — required either a formal request to Germany’s Federal Archives or trudging through microfilm copies housed at the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C. Earlier this year, when the U.S. National Archives began releasing digitized versions of the records online, public interest was so high that the website briefly crashed. For German newspaper Die Zeit, the archive presented an opportunity. While the records had become publicly available, navigating them remained a challenge. Millions of membership cards were scattered across thousands of PDF files, making individual searches near impossible. A team of reporters, data journalists, and data scientists set out to change that. A few weeks after the archive’s release was reported in German media, Die Zeit had built a searchable database that transformed millions of scanned membership cards into an accessible public resource. The project has since attracted millions of searches, with users uncovering the names of grandparents, great-uncles, and other relatives whose party membership had long remained hidden within the archive. The database is also challenging a persistent misconception about Nazi Germany. While conscription to the Wehrmacht — the German armed forces under the Nazis — was compulsory, membership in the Nazi Party itself was not. Despite some professions carrying heavy social pressure to sign up, it remained voluntary to join. Gregor Aisch, a visual data journalist at Die Zeit, and Andreas Loos, head of the newspaper’s data science and AI desk, spoke to GIJN about how the project came together, the role artificial intelligence played in making the archive searchable, and the unexpected response that followed publication…”