History of the Inventor: The Act of 29 March 1935 on the Regulation of Public Land Requirements (Gesetz über die Regeung des Landbedarfs der öffentlichen Hand) (1) issued by the Reich Ministry of Food and Drink (Reichsernährungsministerium) established an Imperial Authority which, with the Führer Decree of 26 June 1935, was to assume the role of "Reich Office for Spatial Planning (RfR)" (Reichsstelle für Raumordnung) "for the entire territory of the Reich"(2). The expansion of planning to the Reich and state level led to the separation of spatial planning from local political sovereignty. "In agreement with the Reich and Prussian Ministers of Labor, the head of the Reich Office for Spatial Planning shall in particular regulate the organization of the planning associations and supervise them. (3) The RfR with its seat in Berlin, as the supreme Reich authority, was directly subordinate to the Führer and Reich Chancellor and, in fulfilling its tasks, made use of the Society for the Preparation of Reich Planning and Regional Planning (Gezuvor) (4), later known as the Reichsplanungsgemeinschaft e.V. (Reich Planning Association). (RPG). Head of the RfR and President of the RPG was the Reich Minister and Prussian State Minister Hanns Kerrl, who also headed the Reich Ministry for Church Affairs (RKM) in personal union. After his death in 1941, Hermann Muhs, until then State Secretary in the Reich Ministry for Church Affairs, took over the management of the official business. Due to close personal and organizational ties, the Reichsplanungsgemeinschaft appeared in the business distribution plan of the RfR from June 1937. Both as members of an organization in which the Reich Office for Spatial Planning was assigned the task of "administration", the Reich Planning Community the task of "design". The business distribution plan named two registries which served both offices according to the subject area. (5) The joint budget for the financial year 1937 stated: "Since the fields of activity of the RfR and the RPG overlap in many respects, there has been no complete administrative and budgetary separation between the RfR and the RPG, either in terms of the specific nature of the tasks to be performed or in terms of the appropriate use of all manpower. (6) Kerrls Erste Verordnung zur Durchführung der Reichs- und Landesplanung vom 15. Februar 1936(7) contains the regulations on the organization of subordinate agencies. The organic structure of the regional planning administration should correspond to the dual task of Nazi regional planning - political leadership on the one hand and coordination of all spatially relevant issues on the other. The Reich Office for Spatial Planning was established as an "organ of state and party, and it must be emphasized in particular that its competence is not limited to regulatory work in relation to agriculture, housing and industry, but that it is also co-determinative in the requirements of terrain for the public sector". (8) In organisational terms, a distinction was made between planning authorities and state planning associations. The former were the governors of the Reich and the presidents of Prussia. They supervised the state planning communities and had the task of enforcing the guidelines issued by the central office. They were able to arrange for an annual audit of the accounts and approve the relevant budget. The actual planning work was carried out by the regional planning associations, of which 22 were established throughout the country and whose number increased to 33 by 1941 as a result of the annexations that began in 1938. (9) Its members consisted of rural and urban districts, Reich and Land authorities, self-governing bodies, the administrations of professional organisations and the scientific institutions appointed to promote Reich and Land planning. The managing directors were the state planners. The statutes of the Landesplanungsgemeinschaften were based on the model statutes issued by the head of the Reich Office. Hanns Kerrl had set this up in order to maintain uniformity within the organisation. The statutes provided for the head of the planning authority as chairman and also ensured a close link between the planning communities and planning authorities in the further administrative substructure. According to the model scale of contributions, costs were borne in the following proportions: 51% was borne by the Reich, the remainder was borne equally by the member groups "self-government" (e.g. provincial associations, urban and rural districts) and "economy" (e.g. German Labour Front, Reichsnährstand, Chambers of Industry and Commerce). (10) The Landesplanungsgemeinschaften were treated as public corporations. (11) The services of the State, local authorities and professional organisations were required to provide administrative and administrative assistance to planning authorities and associations. Created as a management and coordination body for territorial planning in the entire territory of the Reich, the RfR was first to "ensure that the German area was shaped in a manner appropriate to the needs of the people and the state". (12) In addition to civilian settlement planning and management, the armament programme also dealt with the location distribution of military installations and traffic routes. Nevertheless, the decisive plans were ultimately drawn up by the Wehrmacht, the Reich Ministry of Economics and the four-year plan officers. (13) The Reich Office had practically no decision-making powers and could only veto them in individual cases. Its activities were thus limited to administrative supervision of regional planning authorities, state planning associations and the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Raumforschung, which directed and coordinated research results on questions of territorial planning. In cooperation with the Reich Minister for Science, Education and People's Education, "the faculties of all German universities were called upon in the largest form to cooperate". (14) With the help of the scientific universities, expert opinions were developed on issues of emergency and conurbation rehabilitation in the pre-war period, with the focus after the outbreak of war also on the integrated eastern regions. As the central control authority, however, the Reich Office for Spatial Planning gradually lost its authority, at the latest at the time of the intensive work of the office of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of the German People, created under Heinrich Himmler, in shaping the "living space in the East". (15) The ban of all post-war planning imposed by Hitler during the war led to the cessation of the actual professional activity. The personnel of the RfR (16) was increasingly reduced. The exemptions from military service required by the planning institutions were no longer granted after the defeat of Stalingrad. On 6 February 1943, the head of the Reich Chancellery, Dr. Lammers, informed the Supreme Reich Authorities that the Reich Office would now only administer its documents and provide information on request. (17) For reasons of air-raid protection, the documents were transferred to Wittenberg in 1943/44 together with those of the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Raumforschung and parts of the Reich Ministry for Church Affairs. Notes (1) RGBl. 1935, I, p. 468 (2) RGBl. 1935, I, p. 793 (3) RGBl. 1935, I, p. 1515 (4) Previously Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung der Reichsautobahnen e.V. (until 1935) (5) BArch, R 113/2030 (6) BArch, library 96.11.22, p.3 (7) RGBl. 1936, I, p.104 (8) BArch, R 113/2439 (9) Michael Venhoff, "Die Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Raumforschung (RAG) und die reichs- deutsche Raumplanung seit ihrer Entstehung bis die Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges 1945", Hanover 2000, p.15 (10)Pfundtner/Neubert, Das neue Deutsche Reichsrecht I b 25 p.12 (11)See, inter alia, Werner Weber, "Die Körperschaften, Anstalten und Stiftungen des öffentlichen Rechts", Munich and Berlin, 1943, p.52 (12)See §3 of the Gesetz über die Regelung des Landbedarfs der öffentlichen Hand vom 29.3.1935 (13) "Special planning in the individual fields of activity continues to be the responsibility of the responsible departments. They have the obligation to announce their planning plans to the Reich Office for Spatial Planning." (2nd decree on the Reich Office for Regional Planning of 18 Dec. 1935), R 113/128 (14)BArch, R 113/2439 (15)Cf. Michael Venhoff, see above, p.73 (16)Exact number of employees not available (17)BArch, R 43 II/708, p.51 Inventory description: In March 1946, Martin Mäckler, then Director of Construction in the sector of the British military government, was commissioned by the Berlin magistrate to initiate the return of files from the Reich Office for Regional Planning in Wittenberg. After they had been reviewed, part of these documents were sent in 1947 to the Department of Housing, Urban Planning and Regional Planning of the Central Office of the Labour Department of the British Occupation Zone in Lemgo. After the dissolution of the head office, the maps, files and books were first forwarded to the local tax office and finally requested by the Federal Ministry of Housing. Another much larger part went to the Berlin Main Office for Overall Planning of the West Berlin Magistrate, including personnel files, and was finally handed over to the Berlin branch of the Institute for Spatial Research (Bad Godesberg). The transfer to the Berlin main archive, which had been responsible for official files since 1946 (since 1963 again Secret State Archive), took place in 1959, where the indexing began under the signature Rep.325. In 1962 2295 maps and plans as well as 1717 files in the form of a card index were listed. A mixed collection returned from the USA in April 1962 contained 15 volumes of RfR files, which were combined with the archival records in the main archive. In the course of the exchange of archival records in 1969, the Secret State Archives transferred to the Federal Archives not only the files but also the entire map section of the RfR, which was stored in Koblenz in 1971. On the basis of the first file indexing carried out in the Secret State Archives, the new indexing of the files began in 1987 in the Federal Archives under the inventory signature R 113. A first finding aid book for the approx. 2400 files has been available since 1990. The merger of Koblenz and Potsdam files in the Federal Archives in Berlin-Lichterfelde was completed in 1993. The latter, mainly newspaper clippings, printed publications, and annual and working reports, had been handed over to the German Central Archive in Potsdam by the Magdeburg State Archives in 1957 and by the Wittenberg District Council in 1963. During the database-supported recording of the stock a revision of file titles and classification took place, whereby based on the finding aid book from the year 1990 however it was renounced to sift each of the altogether more than 3000 file volumes again. The majority of series and tape sequences were archived. The map holdings held in Koblenz were not taken into account here. For data protection reasons, the personnel files available in portfolio R113 are not shown in the online find book. Requests in this respect should be addressed directly to the relevant Unit R 3. Characterisation of content: The general organisation and working methods of the Reich Office for Spatial Planning and its branches are documented in the files of the office administration and planning authorities. The traditions of the individual regional planning communities provide an insight into concrete tasks, procedures and areas of activity. The focus here is on documents relating to various economic sectors. The intention to incorporate scientific aspects of spatial research into regional economic and social structures is illustrated, among other things, by the files of the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Raumforschung and the Deutsche Akademie für Städtebau. Ultimately, the collection contains material collections from the archive and the press office, most of which consist of newspaper clippings and printed matter. Supplementary records are the R 164 Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Raumordnung and the RfR map collection (R 113 Kart) in the Federal Archives in Koblenz. State of development: Findbuch (2013) Citation method: BArch, R 113/...
History of the Inventory Designer: The available documents were compiled by Bruno Schumacher, a German employee of the US Document Center in Berlin (BDC). After the collection was handed over to the Federal Archives, large parts were incorporated into their holdings. Inventory description: With the return of files from the Berlin Document Center in Sept./Dec. 1962, the Schumacher Collection was transferred to the Federal Archives in Koblenz. This collection had been collected by a German employee of the BDC, Bruno Schumacher, in years of work. It contains printed publications as well as files taken from the various provenance and collection holdings kept in the BDC, whereby the selection criterion was the importance, the documentation value, of the material. Archivische Bewertung und Erschließung Schumacher intended to create a material collection of the most important documents on the history of the Nazi era for his hand use and thus to create a key position for himself in the BDC. In selecting and recombining the material, he did not take into account provenance, registry or volume connections, but arranged everything according to a very roughly applied pertinence principle. His memory alone served as a finding aid for the more than 500 volumes. When he retired in 1960, the collection was recorded in lists and an "order scheme" was formed. The aim of the Federal Archives in Koblenz was to dissolve the Schumacher Collection and to assign the documents to the various holdings. In 1963, the official party publications of the Schumacher Collection were incorporated into ZSg. 3 (official party publications). The documents of Bavarian provenance were removed in 1966 and handed over to the Bavarian Main State Archives. Over the years, smaller parts of the collection have been incorporated into the relevant archives and provenance holdings. For example, KPD material from the Schumacher Collection was transferred to the NS 26 Main Archive of the NSDAP (1967). Starting in 2004, the "Research" collection of the former BDC and the subsequent integration of the documents into the Schumacher Collection, now kept in the Federal Archive in Berlin-Lichterfelde, was processed by the project group NS Archive of the MfS. Among other things, it was established here that the indexing information of the archival records recorded at R 187 is partly identical with that of the respective file numbers at "Research". Obvious duplicates and copies have been collected. "Novelties" have been assigned to the Schumacher Collection. Abbreviations BDM Bund Deutscher Mädel or DAF Deutsche Arbeitsfront DRK Deutsches Rotes Kreuz Gestapo Geheime Staatspolizei HJ Hitlerjugend ed. published KJVD Communist Youth Association Germany KPD Communist Party Germany NSKOV NS NS War Victim Care NSDAP National Socialist Workers' Party Germany NSDStB National Socialist German Student Union SAJ Socialist Workers' Youth SD Security Service SPD Socialist Party Germany TeNo Technical Emergency Aid TH Technical University USchlA Committees of Inquiry and Conciliation Content Characterization: The collection contains printed matter, files and other written material from governmental and party-official departments v. a. of the years 1933-1945. State of development: Stock in progress. Citation style: BArch, R 187/...