Nazi database takes Germans on personal journey into their families’ dark pasts

Die Zeit’s online database of individuals’ Nazi membership is prompting a reckoning as people uncover ties to regime

Olaf Köndgen is 64 years old, a German citizen and a senior European human rights expert who has lived and worked in France for several years. Last month, Köndgen learned that he is also the son of a Nazi.

Despite a strong interest in history and its lessons, Köndgen is typical of many 21st-century Germans in having had only the roughest outlines of his own family’s complicity with Hitler’s regime.