The NSDAP Membership Dataset
The Nazi Party Membership Dataset digitizes the surviving membership catalogue of the NSDAP from the images released by the U.S. National Archives in early 2026. It includes both the Zentralkartei and the Ortsgruppenkartei (roughly 10.9 million cards), representing an estimated 90 percent of individuals ever registered as party members. Records contain a member’s name, date of birth, membership number, and date of entry. The cards also record occupation and geographic information — place of birth, local chapter, Gau, and address — though these fields are extracted with lower and more variable accuracy; the paper reports rates field by field. Because the data cover the surviving catalog rather than a sample of it, they support analyses of the party’s composition and growth that sample-based data cannot, and they make it possible to establish which members of another population had belonged to the party. The accompanying paper documents the provenance of the records, the digitization procedure, and the accuracy of both the extracted data and the matching to external sources; it is worth reading before using the data to make claims about individuals. The data are available in R and Stata formats.
The paper:
The data:
Journal of Law and Courts Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/POLB8B