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Archival description
Stadtarchiv Worms, 180/01 · Fonds
Part of City Archive Worms (Archivtektonik)

Inventory description: Dept. 180/1 Heylsche Lederwerke Liebenau Scope: 260 archive boxes and 7 linear metres of books/standing (= 1104 units of registration = 40 linear metres) Duration: 1879 - 1975 Acquisition, history of the inventory Dept. 180/1 comprises the most complete company archive within the archive holdings of the Worms municipal archive. It represents the development of the Worms leather industry, especially in the period from about 1922 to the end of production after its discontinuation at the factory in Worms-Neuhausen in 1974. There are no losses during the war, cassations of the material, of which nothing is known in detail, were obviously limited. After the end of production in the Liebenau plant (Neuhausen, area Kurfürstenstraße, today the workshops and administration of Lebenshilfe Worms are located there), the inventory, initially operating as Abt. 169 (until its renaming in 1996), was taken over by the Worms municipal archives in 1974 in consultation with Mr Ludwig Frhr. v. Heyl, born in 1920. Until 2008, it was stored in a standing position (mainly file folders, cf. fig.) in the Adenauerring office building, Oberer Keller, with a circumference of 49 linear metres. When the files were selected for submission to the archives, a considerable part of the documents relating to the work (which in turn were mixed with Heyl's family archives) was separated from the parts handed over to the archives; this part was transferred to the municipal archives in 1997 as Dept. 185. The latter, a very rich and extensive collection, has been listed since 2007 and contains both company and private documents of the von Heyl family. It is essential to use the inventory to supplement the source material available here (cf. in future the preface to the finding aid book). The archive holdings of Dept. 180/1 did not have a clear internal structure at the time of its transfer and were first opened up or provisionally in 1993/94 by the student Mr Burkhard Herd in preparation for his diploma thesis on the leather industry, written at the University of Mannheim in 1994, from 1933 to 1945 (using Heyl-Liebenau as an example). Herd numbered the folders and staplers (approx. 650 units) and entered them (without running times and closer registration according to the usually available back titles) into an alphabetical list of topics, which was able to convey a very compressed first impression of the material with twelve pages. Herd's subsequent work (masch. 144 p.) includes a partial evaluation of questions of Nazi economic history using the example of the leather industry. In this form the stock was always to be used only very limitedly. In 1993, Volker Brecher last evaluated the documents for his study on working conditions in the leather industry during the Second World War as well as for the question of the use of forced labourers. In 2007, Christoph Hartmann presented an analysis of selected aspects of company development in the 1920s. Apart from that, the value of the rich source material for the economic history of Worms and the entire development of the leather industry has remained unused to this day, even nationwide, due to the fact that it has not been developed. From December 2007 to the end of February 2009, the entire holdings were completely listed by the signatory and entered into 'Augias'. In the process, a classification was developed which attempts to take into account the essential overdelivery characteristics and structures of the material. The material was successively brought to the Raschi House and is mainly stored here. The classification reaches its limits where (how often) the documents mix family-private affairs with company matters, where foreign business and domestic activities are intertwined (this applies to the entire field of correspondence) and the like. There have been relatively clear distinctions in the area of personnel and the activities of the company director in committees, chambers and associations since 1942 and 1949, respectively. Main focus and significance About half of the documents are divided between the time before and after 1945; there were probably no war losses. The value of the stock for economic historical research is to be estimated very highly. The main focus in terms of time was between 1922/23 (independence of the company) and 1962 (death of Ludwig C. v. Heyl sen.) or the end of production in 1974. At the end of the 60s the factory still employed about 400 people. Heyl'schen Lederwerke Liebenau in Neuhausen was taken over in 1901 by Cornelius Wilhelm v. Heyl through the acquisition of the shares and integrated into Heyl'sche Gesamtunternehmen. The goatskin factory, which has existed since the end of the 19th century (formerly Schlösser