The file delivery of the Central Office for Trade and Commerce in Stuttgart. Von Walter Grube: The Königlich Württembergische Zentralstelle für Gewerbe und Handel (Royal Württemberg Central Office for Trade and Commerce) has assumed a particularly prestigious position among the authorities that the German states created for their economic administration in the 19th century. It originated as a state college under the Ministry of the Interior in the same revolutionary year of 1848, in which Prussia, Austria and Bavaria established special trade ministries; the notoriously thrifty Württemberg did not know its own ministry for economic affairs until the end of the monarchy, as Baden had in its trade ministry in 1860-1881. Nevertheless, the "Central Office", above all under the leadership of the great Ferdinand von Steinbeis (1856-1880), was successful in economic policy, which, in addition to the achievements of the ministries of trade and commerce of other countries, was quite impressive. It was thanks to the work of the Central Office that Württemberg, which was poor in raw materials, technically still lagging behind, and had unfavorable transport connections, soon became the actual state of state trade promotion, from which people for a long time tried eagerly to learn, not only in Germany. The Central Office played a decisive role in the restructuring of the Württemberg economic structure in the age of the Industrial Revolution. The historian of her first heyday in 1875 has divided her versatile field of activity into the following groups: 1. "Consultative services" in legislative and administrative matters: trade, customs, trade, banking and building legislation, coinage, measure and weight, commercial security police, iron and salt extraction, transport, taxation and more.a.; 2. teaching activities: trade schools, travelling teachers, trade training workshops, model and teaching material collection, trade model store, library, journalistic work, associations; 3. "Direct influence on commercial activity": markets, trade fairs, stock exchanges, exports, foreign commercial agencies; 4. direct influence on commercial activity": support with capital and technical suggestions for all branches of industry; 5. regimental activity" mainly as a state patent office, state exhibition commission, central authority for chambers of commerce and industry, state calibration authority and in the administration of commercial foundations. Among these activities, in the country conscious of its school tradition, "instructive work" has always rightly been regarded as a special glorious page of the Central Office; the Protestant Prelate Merz once called it a "jewel of Württemberg". Not least due to the educational work of the central office and the commission for the commercial further training schools founded in 1853, a down-to-earth tribe of recognised skilled workers grew from day labourers, small farmers' and vineyard gardeners' sons, from guilt-bound master craftsmen and a poorly developed trading class of that highly qualified entrepreneurship which, in addition to the broad stratum of vital small and medium-sized enterprises characteristic of Württemberg, has created many a company of world renown. The far-sighted way in which the Central Office, overcoming some resistance, drove trade promotion and economic policy in general at that time was still noticeable in its effects up to the crisis resistance of the Württemberg economy, which was widespread and much envied in the thirties of our century.After the state revolution of 1918 had also given Württemberg its own ministries for the economy (Labour Ministry and Food Ministry, 1926 united to form the Economics Ministry), the Central Office for Trade and Commerce was reorganised by decree of the State Ministry of 30 November 1920 under new distribution of responsibilities to the State Trade Office. For the organization of the state economic administration, this was not as revolutionary as the founding of the Central Office, with which a completely new epoch of Württemberg industrial history had begun. But the reorganization was more far-reaching than the repeated renewal of the "Basic Provisions" of 1848, through which the Central Office had repeatedly adapted itself to the changes in economic life and in the relationship between the state and the economy in the course of its seventy-year history. The Central Office, the creation of the revolution of 1848, thus underwent its strongest transformation to date through the revolution of 1918. As one can easily understand, the precipitation of files from the Central Office represents a unique source in the state sector for the economic history of Württemberg in the years 1848-1920. In addition, the Central Office had taken over not inconsiderable files of older semi-private institutions founded or sponsored by the state, such as the "Gesellschaft für Beförderung der Gewerbe" (Society for the Promotion of Trade) founded in 1830 and the "Handels- und Gewerbsverein" (Trade and Trade Association) founded in 1819, and later partly also the "Zentralstelle des landwirtschaftlichen Vereins" (Central Office of the Agricultural Association) established in 1817. The registry of the Stuttgart Central Office for Trade and Commerce in 1920, when it was transformed into the State Trade Office, contained the relevant records of a full century. The Central Office, like the majority of the 19th century ministries and state resource authorities, has not exercised little care in its registry. The first registry plan of the newly founded authority, which was first provisionally housed in the building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was drafted in 1850 by Reinhardt's secretary, a booklet of only 37 pages; it remained in force throughout the Steinbeis era until the early eighties. The files taken over immediately in 1848 by the Gewerbeförderungsgesellschaft and the Handels- und Gewerbeverein were incorporated into the individual departments of the registry in 1850. The same procedure was followed when, in 1882, on the occasion of the reorganization of the registry of the Central Office for Agriculture, the previous files of the Central Office of the Agricultural Association had been handed over to the association, as well as again in 1888, when papers from the estate of the well-known national economist Moriz Mohl were handed over to the association. In 1869 a separate room had to be set up for the registry, which until then had been housed in the only chancellery room, and the three "full-grafted" file shelves had to be increased by two new ones. In 1883, not long after the Director (and later President) Robert von Gupp took office, a fundamental reorganization of the further swollen registry overflowing into the corridors and attic had become indispensable. The work was transferred by the Ministry of the Interior to the civil servant Heberle of the Oberamt Schwäbisch Hall, since it could not be handled by the few civil servants of the central office, and was only completed after three years. The new registry plan drawn up by Heberle, now already a volume of 200 pages, has been preserved, while his repertory, four times as extensive, unfortunately did not come to us. For the first time, Heberle systematically separated the current registry (then 1109 fascicles) from the old registry (then 1242 fascicles). On the occasion of these works also the first file cassations of considerable size took place (about 180 fascicles and volumes). The surviving elimination lists show that this was done conscientiously and that there was probably very little collected, which would be of interest to the economic historian today. The order created in 1883-85 has survived the relocation of the central office to the new magnificent building of the Stuttgart State Trade Museum in 1896; even today, a large part of the files can be found in the fascicles formed and inscribed by Heberle. In the new building, in 1901-1902, the old registry, which had already grown into a proper official archive, could be separated and appropriately furnished in the attic. In 1905-1908, Obersekretär Hauser produced a new file plan of 800 pages for old and current registries, using but also improving the Heberleschen order, which was in use until the reorganization of the Central Office in 1920 and has fortunately been preserved. The fact that substantial parts of it then fell victim to the bombs of the Second World War is one of the most sensitive source losses for research. All files of the Central Office, which had been sent to the Ministry of Economy by the State Trade Office in the wake of the organisational changes of 1920, were burnt with the Ministry of Economy, including valuable files on chambers of commerce, trade contracts and customs 1819-1870 as well as on railways 1857-1913. Apart from the ruinous remains, all files of the Central Office that were still in the possession of the Stuttgart State Trade Office during the Second World War have also been destroyed, including not only extensive material from the first two decades of the 20th century, which was still curious at the time, but also some departments dating back a long way, some of which still had files from the "Gesellschaft für Beförderung der Gewerbe" (1830-1848) and its predecessors. These were once two larger deliveries by the Stuttgart State Trade Office from 1930 and 1939, a total of about 40 m (today inventory E 170), and the files of the Patent Commission of the Central Office, which were handed over by the Reich Patent Office in 1939 and which, according to the German Patent Law of 25 January 1877, were not available for inspection. The first volume was sent to Berlin in May 1877 (Reichsgesetzblatt pp. 501ff.) (11 m, today stock E 170a), and finally 60 volumes of invoices from the Zentralstelle (1848/49-1908/09, 2 m), which the Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg had taken over in 1921 with the invoice section of the former Finanzarchiv (today stock E 224a). The existing registry aids, administrative repertories, handover and elimination directories no longer allow even a rough percentage to be given today of how the volume of this rescued document (a total of 53 linear metres) relates to that of the lost document. But on the basis of Hauser's file plan of the Central Office from 1905-1908 at least the larger and for research most perceptible gaps in the inventory handed down to us can be determined. For example, most of the minutes of the meetings are missing, the files on the well-known Stuttgart State Trade Museum (the second oldest in Europe) and those on the Information Centre for the Construction Industry; in addition to the diaries, the once demonstrably existing files on the large library of the Central Office - the most important of Germany's trade libraries -, on social insurance, industrial legal protection, building legislation, traffic with foodstuffs, luxury foods and utensils have been completely lost. Despite these and other gaps, the preserved files of the Central Office and its predecessors still represent an invaluable source for the economic history of the Württemberg royal period. It is well known that the records of the commercial enterprises, most of which grew out of small businesses, are often extremely incomplete and not easily accessible for general use; the valuable archives of the Stuttgart and Ulm Chambers of Commerce were almost completely destroyed by the Second World War. The central tradition of state industrial promotion thus offers not only the only opportunity to explore the great transformation process of the 19th century as a whole; it is also widely the only source both of the history of hundreds of individual enterprises and of the emergence of economic self-government. This source was already not completely unused. But for a long time, the partially quite inadequate degree of their development prohibited the real exploitation of them. Only the annual accounts of the Central Office (in inventory E 224a) did not require any special expenditure for archival finding aids. In chronological order, you will find detailed evidence of all measures for industrial education and support for trade, of each "sending experts abroad and appointing tradesmen from the same field" (as one of the invoice headings reads), of the purchase of models, drawings, samples, sample tools, machines and inventions, of exhibitions and prize distributions, of the introduction of new branches of industry and the upgrading of existing ones, of the promotion of the sale of goods, of trade associations and craftsmen, and finally of expenditure on fundamental studies of industrial development. Anyone looking for individual companies or persons in the accounts must of course, in order to reach their goal quickly, already be aware of the vintages in question, and must also be content with the fact that 19th century accounts, less informative than some from earlier times, essentially give facts and only rarely motives.In 1949, the State Archives Ludwigsburg was able to complete a hand-written archive repertory for the patent files of the Central Office (fonds E 170a), which had been taken over in 1939 without any index, during the executive board of the then Oberarchivrat Dr. Max Miller. In two volumes (with together more than 1000 pages) it lists the protocols of the patent commission and some general files as well as the chronologically arranged special files on all Württemberg patents examined by the central office in the years 1848-1877 (with name index). In addition, for the years 1841 to 1848, it makes accessible the relevant preparatory files of the Central Office of the Agricultural Association, which was responsible for the patent system at that time, characteristic of the Biedermeier view of commercial economy. The collection, easily accessible since 1949 (a total of 2373 tufts), contains patent files of Swabian inventors (e.g. Daimler, Max Eyth, Magirus, Gebrüder Mauser and Friedrich Voith) as well as numerous patent applications of non-Württembergians (from the rest of Germany, from other European countries and from America), all in all quite considerable documents for the history of technology. It proved to be more difficult for the archive administration to catalog the even more important and far more extensive file deliveries of the Landesgewerbeamt of 1930 and 1939, the first of which is already listed in K.O. Müller's printed "Gesamübersicht" of 1937 (fonds E 170). In the research service of the State Archives, especially since the Second World War, there have been repeated attempts to use these files for surveys of company histories and anniversaries. But the scarcity of the summary handover lists made this an always time-consuming and often unsuccessful effort. Even the question of individual facts and data could embarrass the archivist; there was absolutely no question of a systematic evaluation of the holdings for the economic and social history, which is becoming more and more important from year to year. Paul Gehring's important essays on Württemberg economic history in the 19th century had to be written without the use of these files, especially under the difficult working conditions of the war and post-war years. Under these circumstances, the production of a scientifically useful repertory became an urgent desideratum of both administration and research. Fortunately, in 1958, the efforts of State Archives Director Dr. Max Miller to obtain funds from the State Trade Office of Baden-Württemberg for the temporary employment of a legally and economically trained processor of these trade and commercial files were successful. The typewritten repertory E 170 comprises three state folio volumes of almost 1000 pages and, restored according to the Hauser file plan from 1905-1908, makes the holdings usable right down to their finest ramifications. Some of it certainly is of predominantly regional or even only local historical interest. But much of it shows in surprisingly rich detail how systematically the Central Office used the experiences and models of the then technically and socially advanced German and non-German states (above all Belgium and England) to raise the Württemberg economy. There are numerous files on the secondment of entrepreneurs, technicians and craftsmen abroad for technical and artistic training, on experiments with foreign machines and production processes, on the appointment of foreign specialists, on participation in major international exhibitions from Paris and London to Philadelphia and Melbourne. Thus, the collection of files shows the way in which a 19th-century German middle-class state developed its craft with comparatively modest but skilfully invested financial expenditures and helped its industry to become internationally competitive. At the goal of this way stood, that was the specifically Württemberg of a gemeindeutschen procedure per se, a quality industry of large variety and healthy decentralization. The typewritten finding aid was provided by Rudolf Denk, Walter Grube and Wolfgang Schmierer (completion 1969). Note: This finding aid book is a repertory which has been available only in typewritten form up to now and which has been converted into a database-supported and thus online-capable format according to a procedure developed by the "Working Group on Retroconversion in the State Archives Ludwigsburg". This can lead to a certain discrepancy between the modern external appearance and the today partly outdated design and wording of the title records, in particular:- corrections, deletions and supplements were checked and incorporated.- The title records of archive units found to be missing were taken over and provided with a corresponding note ("Missing since ...." or similar).- If the allocation of new order numbers was unavoidable, the old signature was verified in the respective title record and in a separate overall concordance.
Contains among other things: Renewal of customs and trade treaties with Italy, Austria-Hungary and Switzerland; friendship treaty with Tonga; protocol on traffic in the Sulu Archipelago between the German Reich, Spain and Great Britain; trade convention with Romania; friendship, trade, shipping and consular treaty with Hawaii; treaty between Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Great Britain, Italy, Russia and Turkey (Berlin Congress); Treaty of Friendship with the Samoa Islands; Trade and Shipping Treaty with Spain; Trade Treaty with Egypt; Trade and Shipping Treaty with Uruguay; Termination of the Treaty of Friendship, Trade and Shipping with Argentina; Friendship, Trade, Shipping and Consular Treaty with Nicaragua; Treaty of Friendship and Trade with the Orange Free State (South Africa)
Preliminary remark: The documents in this inventory include the trade, commercial and customs matters directly concerning Württemberg as well as documents on the role of Württemberg in the German Customs Union. These include the individual sectors of the manufacturing industry, but also the banking sector. The inventory E 40/56 consists of the following registry headings: "Internal" for trade and industry from E 41 Verz. 63 and E 46 "Salt works" from E 46 and "Salt and salt industry" from E 41 Verz. 63 "Applications" for trade and industry" from E 41 Verz. 63 and E 49 Supplement 1938 "Zoll / Handel" from E 36 Verz. F In addition, there are some documents from E 36 Verz. 60 and E 41 Verz. 63, which were filed according to the country headings. In particular, further holdings of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs may be relevant for the areas listed below: Economic Policy, Trade and Commerce in the German Reich: E 40/16 Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Allgemeine Außenpolitik, Norddeutscher Bund, Deutsches Reich, Bundesrat und Bundesangelegenheiten 1866-1918Prints on trade and industry: E 40/37 Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Press matters, submission of printed works, copyrightState banking and finance: E 40/52 Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Public finances, real estate, statistics and topographyCommercial police: E 40/54 Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Police mattersWarfare economy: E 40/72 Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Kriegssachen und Militärangelegenheiten und E 74 Württembergische Gesandtschaft in BerlinHandelsschulen: E 40/74 Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Science, Culture, Church and School AffairsCommercial Legislation: E 40/76 Ministry of Foreign Affairs: JusticeThe majority of the title recordings were made by Dr. Kurt Hochstuhl at the end of the 1990s. Since the allocation of categories in the old lists was very inconsistent, so that further growth was always to be expected, the inventory was left for a longer period of time as a temporary solution and the completion of the finding aid book was waited until the completion of all title entries and their final allocation. The stock now comprises 531 tufts (4.4 m).Stuttgart, in February 2011Johannes Renz c) nationality mark: A]Austria [B]Belgium [BR]Brazil [CH]Switzerland [CHN]People's Republic of China [CZ]Czech Republic [DK]Denmark [E]Spain [EAT]Tanzania [F]France [UK]Great Britain and Northern Ireland [GR]Greece [H]Hungary [I]Italy [IRL]Ireland [J]Japan [JA]Jamaica [MEX]Mexico [NL]Netherlands [NL]Netherlands [PE]Peru [PL]Poland [RI]Indonesia [RUS]Russia [TR]Turkey [USA]United States of America
Foreword: The German Confederation, a confederation of states created by the Federal Act of 8 June 1815 at the Congress of Vienna, initially comprised 34 sovereign princes and four free cities, the last 28 of which were sovereign princes. It also included Denmark for Holstein and Lauenburg, England for Hanover (until 1837) and the Netherlands for Luxembourg and Limburg (from 1839). The only federal body was the Federal Assembly (also known as the Bundestag) in Frankfurt a. M., which met for the first time on 5 November 1816 after lengthy preliminary negotiations and was chaired by Austria as the presidential power. It was responsible for various commissions and other institutions such as the Federal Chancellery Directorate, the Military Commission, the Central Investigation Commission and the Federal Central Authority. The development of the German Confederation into a nation state remained impossible due to the guaranteed sovereignty of the member states and due to the dualism of the two great powers Austria and Prussia as well as the close connection of Austria to its non-German territories. The expansion of the Federal Constitution in the reactionary sense became disastrous. The resulting revolution of 1848/49 sought to transform the German Confederation into a national federal state. The Federal Assembly delegated its powers to the Imperial Administrator and ceased its activities on 28 June 1848. After the failure of the revolution, Austria restored the Bundestag in the summer of 1850, initially against Prussia. Prussia and its allies also returned to the Bundestag after the failure of the Union plans of Olomouc and the Dresden Conferences on the Reform of the Confederation, which resumed its activities on 14 May 1851. Further attempts at reform failed in the aftermath. The German Confederation finally broke up in the Austrian-Prussian conflict. In the Prague Peace of August 1866, Austria recognised the dissolution of the Confederation. The Württemberg legation to the Bundestag or the provisional central power for Germany 1848/49 existed from 1815 to 1866. It had to report all political matters negotiated in the Federal Assembly to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Ministry then decided on the further course of action and arranged for the Frankfurt resolutions to be enforced within Württemberg. Like the department so also the files about the Bundestag affairs had a prominent position in the ministry. Own diaries kept separately from the diaries of the main registry can be traced from November 1816 to December 1849 (E 59 Vol. 181-231). In order to distinguish between the general documents of the Ministry kept in blue envelopes, these files were filed in reddish fascicles, as laid down in paragraph 14a of the Rules of Business Procedure of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of January 1824 (E 40/31 Bü 32). The allocation of the file numbers seems to have taken place initially according to an alphabetical structure (as described in the preface of the finding aid book to fonds E 65). But this scheme must soon have proved to be useless. In any case, in the twenties the registry was reorganized, whereby a new system was introduced with light fact file approaches according to chronological order. Only in the series of envoy reports was the old order maintained until about 1845. Between 1872 and 1904, the files must have been transferred from the secret registry of the Ministry to the Directorate of Archives. After temporary storage in the Staatsfilialarchiv Ludwigsburg, they were forwarded to the Staatsarchiv Stuttgart for safekeeping. The Staatsfilialarchiv also drew up lists of items for sale ("Bundesakten" Verz. ad 57 and "Zoll- und Handelssachen" Lit. F). At the time of the transfer, cassations also appear to have been provided for after entries on various envelopes, but these were then omitted for reasons no longer known. The present directory unites the files of the Foreign Ministry concerning the Württemberg Bundestag legation in Frankfurt a. M. from various holdings. The main part consists of archival documents from E 65 Verz. 24, 40 and 57 and E 36 Lit. F. Furthermore, some legation files, which had already been recorded in the eighties, were moved here. The archival records summarised under the keyword "complaints" were dissolved and structured according to the principle of fact files in the same way as the entire holdings. Files that did not come into existence until after the dissolution of the German Confederation in 1866 were assigned to the corresponding holdings of E 40, as were documents originating from other ministries that were returned there according to the principle of provenance. Only empty envelopes of some of the files rearranged in the ministry were left; these were collected. Minutes of the Federal Assembly from October 1816 to 1863 and of the Military Commission from 1837 to 1861 are available in the printed matter room of the Main State Archives. Other Military Commission protocols are also held in E 40/72 Bü 250-262. These logs were therefore not recorded in the record. Old pagination is obsolete. The collection paints a very vivid picture of the time of the German Confederation and the provisional central power in 1848/49 throughout Germany. It contains documents about the resolutions of the Bundestag and their implementation in Württemberg and thus also material about events in Württemberg. The countertradition - albeit to a much lesser extent - is in stock E 65. The indexing took place from 1980 to 1983 and from 1997 within the framework of training by the archive trainees Ronald Asch, Irmtraud Betz, Ernst Otto Bräunche, Elke Koch, Carl-Jochen Müller, Andreas Schmauder, Wolfgang Stetter and Volker Trugenberger as well as by the archive inspector candidates André Kayser, Thomas Krause, Sandra Krischel, Alexander Rantasa, Caroline Schach and Nicole Schütz. Wilfried Braunn then recorded the rest. The online-capable classification of the stock as well as the further editorial work were taken over by the undersigned. The transfer of the title recordings in MIDOSA 95 datasets, which were made on the index forms, was carried out by Ms. Tanja Bürger, Ms. Anna-Maria Diener and Ms. Gisela Filipitsch; Wilhelm Gieb and Doris Köhler took care of the packaging of the archive boxes. The present collection now contains 1737 numbers (the serial number 1433 is not documented) in the range of 43.1 linear metres with a running time from 1815 to 1866, including pre-files from 1771 and post-files up to 1875. Individual documents on economic history up to 1833 can be found in printed form: Prehistory and justification of the German Customs Association 1815-1834. Files of the states of the German Confederation and the European powers. Arranged by W. v. Eisenhart Rothe and A. Ritthaler, Volume I-III, Berlin 1934 Stuttgart, June 2001 Wilfried Braunn Sabine Schnell
History of the Inventory Designer: Origin and Development of the Ministry, Competences: Prior to 1914, food and agriculture matters were predominantly the administrative responsibility of the States. As far as the Reich was involved, the corresponding tasks were performed by the Reich Office of the Interior. The First World War brought a decisive turning point here; the longer the war lasted, the more urgent it was to take economic measures to secure food supplies. The first step in this direction was the establishment of the War Grain Society on 25 November 1914. On 28 June 1915, this company was united with the authority of the Reich Commissioner for Bread Management, which was founded only a little later, and the Reich Distribution Office, which was responsible for supplying flour, to form the Reichsgetreidestelle. For the management and distribution of other products, a large number of other Reich offices were set up in the course of the following months, for whose joint supervision the War Food Office was established on 29 May 1916. This was the first time that a central authority had been created for the uniform regulation of the war food industry in the Reich. Since the general emergency after the end of the war made a temporary continuation of the forced economic measures in the food sector necessary, the institution was retained and renamed the Reichsernährungsamt on 19.11.1918. This is the immediate predecessor authority of the Reich Ministry of Food, which was founded by decree of 21 March 1919 on the "Establishment and Designation of the Supreme Reich Authorities". In connection with the discussion about the common economy, the Ministry of Food was temporarily united with the Ministry of Economics from 15.9.1919 to 30.3.1920. After it became independent again, it was given the name "Reichsministerium für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft" (Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture). With the National Socialist assumption of power, the food industry was gradually subjected to state-controlled market regulation. The Reichsnährstandsverwaltung, which was created on the basis of the standardization or dissolution of the previous professional associations and self-administration bodies by the law of 13 September 1933, not only belonged to the RMEL's area of supervision, but was at the same time linked to the ministry at the head by personal union. Analogous to other supreme Reich authorities, the RMEL was merged with the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture on January 1, 1935 and until the incorporation of Austria in 1938 was called the "Reichs- und Preußisches Ministerium für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft". A new and thus competing responsibility for the food industry arose with the promulgation of the Four-Year Plan in 1936. An organisational link with RMEL was established in that one of the two State Secretaries took over the management of the Nutrition Business Group in the Four-Year Plan. Due to a lack of personnel, the Reichsnährstandsverwaltung was integrated into RMEL during the Second World War. When RMEL was founded in 1920, its responsibilities extended to agriculture, the food industry, forestry, timber and fishing. The ministry kept these competences more or less unchanged for more than a decade. With effect from 5.7.1932, the Reich Ministry of Labour also assigned the RMEL the task of "Agricultural Settlement". On the other hand, it had to hand over to the newly established Reich Forestry Office on 12.7.1934 and 12.7.1935 the competences of forestry and hunting respectively the timber industry and the game trade. After several attempts by RMEL to take over responsibility for veterinary matters from the Reich Ministry of the Interior had failed, the Prussian Veterinary Department, which had belonged to the competence of the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture, was rather assigned to the Ministry of the Interior by decree of 11 March 1935 after its merger with RMEL. Even before the merger, the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture had transferred responsibility for the agricultural vocational and technical education system to the newly created Reich Ministry of Science, Education and People's Education by law of 29 June 1934. The competence of the water management, which RMEL had taken over when it merged with the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture, was lost to the newly appointed Inspector General for Water and Energy by decree of 29.7.1941. Inventory description: Inventory history Most of the RMEL files (approx. 2500 volumes) handed over to the Reichsarchiv until 1944 were destroyed during the bombing of Potsdam in April 1945. The same fate affected the vast majority of RMEL's files, which were located in the Berlin office buildings in Wilhelmstrasse and Behrenstrasse. The main exception to this rule were those files which had reached the area around Landsberg/Warthe in connection with the evacuation of various departments of the RMEL and the Reichsnährstandsverwaltung during the final months of the war. A further relocation to the Müncheberg/Seelow forest near Küstrin was planned, but was not possible. When it was merged with RMEL, a large stock of files from the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture had already been transferred to the then Prussian State Secret Archives. Since 1990, these files, which have meanwhile been kept by the Merseburg Department of the Central State Archives of the GDR, have again been kept in the Secret State Archives of Prussian Cultural Heritage in Berlin. The remains of the RMEL files seized by the American occupying forces after the end of the war were first collected together with other holdings of the Food and Agriculture Group at the Ministerial Collecting Center (MCC) in Hessisch-Lichtenau and listed. Most of these files were brought to Berlin with the relocation of the MCC in early 1946 and taken over by the Document Center there a few years later, while a smaller part seems to have reached the Document Center in Darmstadt. With the exception of the files on the expropriation of Jewish agricultural property handed over by the Secret State Archives in Berlin, most of the volumes of the tradition of the Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Forestry, formerly kept in Koblenz as holdings R 14, have been successively transferred to the Federal Archives in Koblenz since 1953. On the other hand, the later filing deliveries from America and England contained only very isolated pieces of the former RMEL. It must be noted here that unfortunately no more than half of the files recorded in Hessisch-Lichtenau finally found their way into the Federal Archives. The remaining files will have to be considered missing today. The records in the Central State Archives in Potsdam until 1990 as holdings 36.01 originate from file transfers by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of the GDR, the State Archives of Potsdam and Magdeburg and from file returns from the USSR. In 1990 both overdelivery parts were combined as stock R 3601. Archival evaluation and processing The order of the holdings is largely based on the business distribution plan of summer 1942, i.e. the individual departments form the main groups of the classification. Subgroups were formed largely on the basis of the main areas of responsibility of the departments. If necessary, modifications were made. Within the individual classification groups, the order was made as far as reasonable and recognizable according to the existing file numbers. Due to the fragmentary character of the tradition, individual volumes are often missing in the series of volumes already created in the registry of the ministry. For the sake of better clarity, no corresponding references were made to the individual follow-up titles. The system only noted if tape sequences or series were created in the archive. In view of the rudimentary tradition, cassations, with the exception of duplicates, were largely avoided. Content characterization: The tradition of the stock is extremely fragmentary. According to the business distribution plan of RMEL of 1942, which forms the basis of the inventory classification, the documents of Department V Customs and Trade Policy are only minimal and those of Department IX Village Armament, Highlands, Reallocation do not exist. The activities of Dept. I General Administrative, Personnel, Budgetary and Legal Matters, Dept. II Production and Food Policy are documented in particular, especially the food security during and after the First World War. World War, as well as the Abt. III Reichsgestütverwaltung. Larger groups of files include the documents of the general administration and those of the experimental and research institutes, the war damage regulation as well as the domain administration, especially in the integrated eastern territories. Above all, however, in this context it is important to refer to the files on the expropriation of Jewish agricultural land. State of development: Online-Findbuch (2008) Citation method: BArch, R 3601/...