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Preliminary remark: At the beginning of the First World War, the German field army was divided into nine armies according to the mobilization plans, seven of which marched on the German western border, the eighth in East Prussia. The Supreme Army Command (OHL) already had to learn in the first months of the war that the original concept of the leadership - direct instructions to the army high commandos under its command - led to considerable frictional losses due to the increase in the mass of troops. Early on, army groups were set up as distinct intermediate instances of the higher leadership in order to subject the military administrative tasks to central completion in addition to the uniform conduct of operations. On 25 February 1917, the Württemberg War Ministry was given the order to set up a new army group under the supreme command of Duke Albrecht of Württemberg, the previous commander-in-chief of the 4th Army. Like the other three army groups in the West, "Crown Prince of Bavaria", "German Crown Prince" and "Gallwitz", it was intended to facilitate the organisational preparation and implementation of the major planned Western offensives. With the establishment of the Herzog Albrecht Army Group, the Army Divisions A and B operating in the southern part of the Western Front were merged with the fortresses of Metz and Strasbourg, which had previously been under the control of the German Crown Prince Army Group, and placed under the control of the new Army Group. It thus encompassed an area from the Swiss border in the south via the almost unchanged frontal course in the Sundgau and the Vosges Ridge, which had remained virtually unchanged since August 1914, along the Franco-German border to the area of Pont-à-Mousson. The command area is almost identical with the Alsace-Lorraine Reichslanden, which had been incorporated into the German Reich since 1871. Strasbourg became the seat of the High Command of the Army Group, and the head of the General Staff of the Royal Bavarian Army. Lieutenant General Krafft v. Dellmendingen, previously Commanding General of the German Alpine Corps, was appointed. From September 9, 1917, the Colonel i. G. Heye took office as his successor. The subordination of the individual units was regulated by the regulation "Subordination of the Army Forces of the West", 1917, issued by the Chief of the General Staff of the Field Army (cf. After the conclusion of the armistice agreements and the associated demobilization, the High Command of the now Army Group D moved its headquarters to Freudenstadt with a subcommand in Durlach/Karlsruhe. In the spring of 1919, both the Army Group and its descendants were finally dissolved, and the files were transferred from the Heilbronn branch of the Reich Archive to the Stuttgart branch of the Reich Archive. In September 1921, even before even a cursory list was drawn up by the military officers working there, parts of the holdings - above all the documents on the "Vaterländischen Unterricht" (fatherland instruction), on the reconnaissance of the troops and on the defence against "American propaganda" - were sent to the Reichsarchiv Potsdam, where they apparently became a pillage of flames together with the rest of the archive during the last days of World War II. In 1923 and 1924, the holdings were recorded for the first time in a list at the Reichsarchiv branch in Stuttgart.1931 large parts of the holdings were temporarily transferred to the Heeresarchiv Potsdam; however, they were not completely returned to the Heeresarchiv Stuttgart, as the Reichsarchiv branch had been called since 1936. For the holdings of the Herzog Albrecht Army Group, only the listing of the archival records from 1923/24 was available as an archival finding aid. It by no means met the requirements placed on modern archive finding aids, especially as it had become unclear and hardly usable due to numerous entries. In the months of May 1988 - March 1989, therefore, a comprehensive new indexing and first structuring of the existing archive holdings took place. Its new formation was based on the business distribution plan of the Supreme Command of the Army Group of 15 October 1917 (cf. Bü 346). Within the individual departments, a factual order was carried out by the processor. A few foreign provenances were separated and included in the corresponding holdings of the Stuttgart Military Archives. A concordance between the new order number and the old tuft number in the previous file index allows the retrieval of already cited archival documents. The present finding aid book was completed with the help of the MIDOSA program package of the State Archive Administration Baden-Württemberg in Karlsruhe in the months of August 1990 to March 1991. The stock now comprises 377 order numbers in 15.1 linear metres. The index refers to the order numbers, i.e. the sequence of title entries in the present Findbuch.Karlsruhe, April 1991Kurt Hochstuhl