GERMANY. Munich. 1945. Discovery of the Nazi Party NSDAP Member Database in a paper mill near Munich.

Eleven million registration cards of members of Germanys Nazi party NSDAP were secured by the American allies near Munich in October 1945. They were covered with waste paper in storage rooms of the paper mill and carton maker Josef Wirth in Freimann. The SS had moved them here between the 18th and 27th of April 1945 from the NSDAP building at Königsplatz, Munich. Supposedly they ordered the paper mill to destroy the cards, but the owner of the mill, Hans Huber, succeeded in hiding them under waste paper. Huber's first attempt in May 1945 to talk to officers of the American military government in Munich was met with insufficient interest. Only with the visit of the archives expert of the US army Sargent B. Child on the 10th of October 1945 the situation changed. Refugees and concentration camp survivers were hired to help with a first sorting process and repackaging the 50 tons of paper, in order to send them to Washington. But it was soon after decided that these documents were to be transported to Kassel and later on to Berlin Zehlendorf. The American military government then opened the Berlin Document Center 7771 with these files and used them for 48 years to shine a light on the biographies of war criminals, detect lies in interviews, conducted during the initiative of denazification in post war Germany. The historical importance of the archive can not be overestimated.