Why the fuck does it matter? Children should not inherit their parents or grandparents crimes.

I’m not German but for fucks sake other countries have committed similar atrocities and nobody gives a shit.

America is currently doing what the Nazis did 80 years ago and so is China, Israel, Russia, so why don’t you ask them how does it feel to have Nazi parents.

I am somewhat torn about the whole thing.

Sure, finding your grandfathers name on a NSDAP membership document can be a shock.
But by itself it doesn’t mean much and in its ambiguity and mundane commonness may even water down the impact of the gruesome details of the Nazi regime.
After all, when everyone seems to have been a party member, it is not much different from no one having been one.

And even if the records don’t contain ones ancestors (as to my own surprise was the case for me), does that mean that you can pat your own shoulder and say “we are clean, show that it would not happen in my family!”?

One of my grandfathers served on the eastern front for a long time (the other was a FLAK, so air defense, soldier in the Ruhrgebiet).
He only ever talked about the later Russian war imprisonment somewhere in Siberia, not about the war itself.
But given the place and extended time span he has been on the eastern front, it seems highly unlikely that he hasn’t seen and maybe even done a lot of inhuman and gruesome stuff, although not being on any NSDAP member lists.

So; what does an entry (or non-entry) in the membership lists really tell me?