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Archival description
BArch, R 61 · Fonds · 1927-1945
Part of Federal Archives (Archivtektonik)

History of the Inventory Designer: Founded in 1933, since 1934 as a public corporation of the Reich subject to the supervision of Reichsju‧stizministers and Reich Minister of the Interior, responsible for the promotion and Ver‧wirklichung of the "National Socialist Program in the Entire Field of Law" Long Text: Founding and Legal Foundations The Academy for German Law was constituted on 26 March 1933. The constituent meeting was attended by the Reich Secretary of the Federation of National Socialist German Lawyers Dr. Heuber, Professors Dr. Wilhelm Kisch and Dr. von Zwiedineck-Südenhorst, the General Director of the Munich Reinsurance Company Kißkalt, two representatives of the business community and the future Director Dr. Karl Lasch. On 22 September 1933 a Bavarian law was passed (Bayerisches Gesetz- und Verordnungsblatt No. 37, p. 277), the only article of which granted the Academy the status of a public corporation. The articles of association were attached as an annex, according to which the provisional seat was to be Munich and which outlined the tasks of the new corporation as follows: By "applying proven scientific methods" it should "promote the reform of German legal life (...) and implement the National Socialist programme in the entire field of law and economics (...) in close and permanent liaison with the bodies responsible for legislation". In detail, her sphere of activity included cooperation in drafting laws, in the reform of legal and political science education, in scientific publications and the financial support of practical scientific work for the research of special fields of law and economics, the organisation of scientific conferences and teaching courses as well as the cultivation of relations with similar institutions abroad. The office of the Führer of the Academy was to be held in personal union by the head of the Reichsrechtsamt of the NSDAP; he was responsible for the external representation of the ADR, its internal management, all personnel decisions and the decision on amendments to the statutes as well as the dissolution in agreement with the Führer of the NSDAP. As auxiliary organs a deputy, a leader staff and a treasurer as well as the department heads of the specialized departments to be created were intended. The Bavarian State Ministry of Justice should be responsible for supervision. The members of the Academy, whose number should not exceed two hundred, were to be appointed for four years; ordinary, extraordinary, sponsoring and corresponding members were distinguished. At the first German Lawyers' Day in Leipzig, the establishment of the Academy for German Law was solemnly proclaimed on 2 October 1933. This already showed that Frank was striving to turn the Academy into an institution of the Reich, which would give him the opportunity to influence the Gleichschaltung der Justitz in the Länder even after he had completed his work as Reich Commissioner for the Unification of the Justitz. On 18 June 1934, the draft of a law on the Academy for German Law was sent to the head of the Reich Chancellery for submission to the cabinet (BA, R 43 II/1509). The Reich Minister of Justice agreed after it had been clarified that the Academy should receive its own funds and not burden the Reich, the Länder or the communities. At the request of the Reich Ministry of the Interior, the draft was amended to provide for joint supervision of the Academy by the Reich Ministry of Justice and the Reich Ministry of the Interior. After adoption in the cabinet meeting of 3 July 1934, the law was passed on 11 July 1934 (RGBl. I. S. 605), with which the Academy for German Law became the public corporation of the Reich; a new statute was attached. With this law, the Academy's tasks changed only to the extent that the responsibility for the reorganization of German legal life in the field of business ceased to exist. The headquarters remained in Munich. The Führer of the Academy became an honorary president, whose appointment was made by the Reich Chancellor. The binding of the office to the management of the Reichsrechtsamt of the NSDAP ceased. As an organ of the Academy, in addition to the President, a Presidium also provided support and advice. The maximum number of members was set at 300. Committees were set up to carry out the practical work of the Academy. The law of 11 July 1934 was not amended until 1945. In November 1934 a change was planned, which provided for a salary for the president according to the regulations for Reich officials. However, the draft was removed from the agenda of the cabinet meeting of 4 December 1934 (BA, R 22/198, R 43 II/1509) on Hitler's instructions. On the other hand, two amendments were made to the statutes, first on 16 October 1935 (RGBl. I. p. 1250). It provided that, in the event of the dissolution of the Academy, its assets would fall to the Reich, due to the taking up of a high mortgage, which the Academy had taken up to expand its Berlin house. More serious in its significance was the second amendment of 9 June 1943 (Reichs- und Staatsanzeiger of 9 June 1943). It was initiated by the new President, Reich Minister of Justice Dr. Otto Thierack. He prohibited the acceptance of private donations for the Academy and abolished the office of treasurer. The new constitution submitted to the Reich Ministry of Justice by the director of the Academy Gaeb on 10 December 1942 was to take this into account and at the same time streamline the provisions (BA, R 22/199). After consultations in the participating Reich ministries, the new constitution was finally formulated in a meeting on 8 June 1943 between representatives of the Reich Ministry of Justice, the Reich Ministry of the Interior and the Academy, signed on 9 July 1943 and published on the same day. In addition to the abolition of the office of treasurer and the institution of supporting members, the main changes were the inclusion of provisions on the President's auxiliary organs and the scientific structure of the Academy, which had previously been included in the structure regulations and the administrative regulations, as well as in a clear arrangement. The aforementioned Aufbauordnung had been issued on 15 December 1936 as an order of the President concerning the reorganization of the scientific work of the Akademie für Deutsches Recht (Zeitschrift der Akademie für Deutsches Recht 1937, p. 23). It defined the structure of the scientific apparatus of the Academy. The first of these, the Honorary Senate, was of little importance, while the other two, the Department of Legal Policy for Legal Policy and the Department of Legal Research for Scientific Research, were of decisive importance. It also dealt with the future centre of the Academy, the "House of German Law", for which the foundation stone had been laid a few months earlier and which was to house the research and educational facilities of the Academy. On April 1, 1937, the President had supplemented and extended the Academy's administrative regulations (Zeitschrift der ADR, p. 405f.) by enacting them, which outlined in more detail the tasks of the individual organs, namely the treasurer and the director, who were responsible for the financial and general administration of the Academy, the director of scientific and legal policy work, the committee chairmen, and the class secretaries entrusted with the direction of the classes. Eight administrative units were also listed, one each for the Legal and Legal Research, Personnel and Legal Office, Organisation, Libraries, Periodicals and Press, International Transport and Cash and Accounting departments. After the amendment of the statutes of 9 June 1943, on 10 June 1943 there was also an amendment to the administrative regulations (Zeitschrift der ADR 1943, p. 37f.), in which the provisions on the treasurer's office were completely omitted and the explanations on the administration were greatly shortened. The extensive information on the administrative departments has been replaced by brief information on the division of units, which has existed for a long time. Organisation and staffing The President of the Academy possessed extensive powers - apart from his ties to the supervisory ministries. His appointment by Hitler and the honorary position, which presupposed a further office securing its holder financially, could give him weight vis-à-vis the authorities and party offices. Its founder, Dr. Hans Frank, was appointed the first President on August 1, 1934. In his memoirs "In the Face of the Gallows" he confesses that the Academy was to be an important means of shaping law for him, especially since the Reichsrechtsamt, of which he had been head since 1929 and which secured him a place in the highest party hierarchy, lost more and more of its importance in the period after the assumption of power, and the NS-Rechtswahrerbund, of which he had held the leadership since 1928, offered only little scope for influencing legislation. Frank's ideas were acknowledged when, after his assignment as Reich Commissioner for the Gleichschaltung der Justiz in den Ländern had ended, he was dismissed by Hitler on 19 March. In the letter of appointment, the Akademie für Deutsches Recht was described as an institution which enabled him "to participate in the implementation of the National Socialist ideology in all areas of law without restriction to the judiciary in the narrower sense", i.e. an expansion of the scope of duties beyond the framework of law-making into the other areas of legal life, which in this form emanating from Hitler represented an important expansion of power. Frank could thus see himself in possession of a kind of special ministry for National Socialist legal formation in competition with Gürtner's Reich Ministry of Justice. In the years up to 1939, Frank, whose ministerial office moved from his first residence at Voßstraße 5 in Berlin to the Berlin building of the Academy at Leipziger Platz 15 on July 3, 1935, remained closely involved with the work of the Academy and legal policy. His attempt in 1939 to free himself from the annoying supervision of the Reich Ministry of Justice and the Reich Ministry of the Interior, which made him dependent on Gürtner and Frick above all with regard to possible changes to the statutes, but also in financial matters, and to subordinate the Academy to his supervision as minister remained unsuccessful (BA, R 2/24103). Frank's presidency ended in August 1942, after his appointment as Governor General in Poland on 12 October 1939, when business had been conducted practically by the Deputy President. Hitler released Frank from his office as President of the Academy with a deed of August 20. It was not true, however, when Frank told his deputy Professor Emge that the reason for the dismissal was the "overcrowded and ever increasing burden" of his duties in the Generalgouvernement. On the contrary, Frank had aroused Hitler's displeasure because between 9 June and 21 July 1942 he had defended law, judicial independence, personal freedom and humanity against the police state in four speeches at the universities of Berlin, Munich and Heidelberg as well as at the Academy of Sciences in Vienna (cf. H. Weinkauff, Die deutsche Justitz und der Nationalsozialismus, 1968, p. 74, 161f.) This solo effort, which was directed primarily against Himmler and Bormann, also led to a ban on speaking and the loss of his position as Reichsrechtsführer and head of the Reichsrechtsamt, which was dissolved. This also involved a change in the office of deputy president, which had to be appointed by the president according to the statutes of 1934 and confirmed by both supervisory ministries. Frank had been represented since 1937 by Dr. Carl Emge, Professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Berlin, after the Vice-President Privy Councillor Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Kisch, Professor of Civil Procedure and German Civil Law at the University of Munich, who had been appointed in 1933, had resigned for health reasons from his office. Emges was replaced in November 1942 by the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice, Dr. Rothenberger. Whether after Rothenberger's dismissal (January 1944) his successor, Herbert Klemm, was also appointed deputy president of the academy after Rothenberger's dismissal as state secretary cannot be determined. The second organ of the Academy, besides the President, was the Presidium. Emerging from the Führerrat of the Academy provided for in the 1933 Law, it had the task of supporting and advising the President, determining the budget and carrying out the preliminary audit of the budget account. According to the administrative regulations issued in 1937, the president, his deputy, the treasurer and the head of the scientific and legal-political work belonged to him by virtue of office. For this purpose, the President could appoint further members of the Academy to the Presidium, which should meet at least once a year. In accordance with the new administrative regulations of 10 June 1943, the Reich Ministers of Justice and Home Affairs joined as new permanent members. The Reich Minister and head of the Reich Chancellery Lammers also belonged to the Presidium. The actual work of the Academy in the fields of legal policy and legal research was directed by the Head of Scientific and Legal Policy Work, who was appointed by the President from among the members and who gave guidelines and assigned tasks to the Legal Structuring and Research Departments. This office, which was particularly important for the work of the Academy after the strong use of Frank by his tasks in the Generalgouvernement, was initially held by State Secretary Freisler, later by the Deputy President. As long as the Academy was supported entirely or to a considerable extent by the voluntary donations of its supporting members, the Treasurer was of great importance. He was responsible for all financial and property management, in particular the supervision of the budget and all contracts affecting the Academy's finances. From the beginning, the function was held by a close confidant of Frank, General Director Arendt, who kept it until its abolition in 1942. However, the treasurer had already lost influence in 1939, since the Reich made an ever larger subsidy to the academy budget and its control thus became stronger and stronger. The general questions of organization, administration, and human resources of the Academy for German Law, as well as the liaison with the Reich authorities, lay with the Director of the Academy. Dr. Karl Lasch held this post from 1933 until his appointment as governor of the Radom district in 1939, after which Dr. Gaeb took over the post as deputy director of the Diplomvolkswirt, which he held until 1945. The members of the Academy were divided into different groups according to their rights and tasks. The core consisted of 300 full members, initially appointed for four years; the number was maintained in 1943, and membership was extended to 10 years. According to Frank, the limitation to a relatively small number should emphasize the elitist character of the academy and awaken an elite consciousness among its members. In addition to legal, political and economic scientists, lawyers and senior civil servants, there were also some corporate members, including the law and political science faculties of the universities, which were represented by their deans. Extraordinary members by virtue of office were the Reich Ministers of Justice and Home Affairs. Foreigners who were interested in the Academy's work and were willing and qualified to contribute to it were accepted as corresponding members. The sponsoring members should maintain the Academy financially. These were mostly commercial enterprises, some of which were actively established and were prepared to make a contribution that varied according to their financial means for the honour of formally belonging to the Academy. The disadvantage of this financing system was that it created a financial dependence on the donations and could arouse suspicion that the donors were influencing the work of the Academy. It was eliminated by prohibiting any acceptance of donations in 1942. The work of the Academy was carried out in the Departments of Legal Design and Legal Research. All ordinary members of the Academy were organised, supervised and directed by the head of scientific and legal policy work. The Legal Department, to which all full members belonged, had to bear the main burden. In numerous (up to over 70) committees which changed over the years, often divided into main, sub and special committees as well as working groups or central committees, it discussed current questions of legal policy and participated in the legislative preparations of the ministries through proposals, statements, expert opinions and drafts. At the Academy's tenth anniversary in June 1943, Thierack was able to point to a considerable number of laws in which it had played a significant role until 1941, including the German Community Code and the 1935 Wehrgesetz (Wehrgesetz - Wehrgesetz - Wehrgesetz - Wehrgesetz - Wehrgesetz - Wehrgesetz - Wehrgesetz - Wehrgesetz - Wehrgesetz - Wehrgesetz - Wehrgesetz - Wehrgesetz - Wehrgesetz - Wehrgesetz - Wehrgesetz - Wehrgesetz - Wehrgesetz - 1935, the 1937 German Civil Service and Stock Corporation Laws, the 1938 Youth Protection and Marriage Laws, the 1939 Law on the Introduction of Compulsory Insurance, and the 1939 Law on the Introduction of Legal Structure, which dealt particularly intensively with the reform of criminal law and the creation of a new People's Code. After the beginning of the war, numerous committees were suspended and, as the war lasted longer, dissolved. Nevertheless, the work did not come to a standstill. Only the emphasis shifted to all matters related to the war, e.g. air-raid protection law and, above all, nationality and international law. The relevant committees dealt in detail with issues relating to the reorganisation of the European continent, but also with maritime and land warfare and relations with the USA. At Frank's request, the Academy also took a stand on questions of German politics in the East and a reorganisation of the Generalgouvernement; it issued a secret report in January 1940: "Rechtsgestaltung deutscher Polenpolitik nach volkspolitischen Gesichtspunkten" (BA, R 61/243, Document 661-PS of the Nuremberg Trial against the Chief War Criminals). In 1942 the Academy still had 76 committees with eleven subcommittees. After all committees that had dealt with peace issues had been gradually suspended or completed their work, by the end of 1943 only committees with directly war-related tasks remained, including the committees on social security and international law. The committees involved in the drafting of the planned National Code also suspended their work, with the exception of the main committee, which only continued the necessary work. The scientific work was carried out within the Academy of German Law by the Department of Legal Research. Only scientists have been appointed to this department. Her task was to research the history, methodology and knowledge of the law and later also of the economy; she met in working groups, which were grouped into classes. First there were three classes, of which class I dealt with the study of the history and basic questions of law, class II with the study of the law of "people and empire" and class III with the study of the "people's federal" legal life. Each class was headed by a class leader. The management was carried out by a class secretary. The offices were initially filled as follows: Class I: Chairman: Prof. Dr. Heymann, Secretary: Prof. Dr. Felgentraeger Class II: Chairman: Prof. Dr. von Freytag-Loringhoven, Secretary: Prof. Dr. Weber Class III: Chairman: Prof. Dr. Weber Dr. Hedemann, Secretary: Prof. Dr. Lange After the war began, there were only class secretaries left, namely for Class I Prof. Dr. Heymann, for Class II Prof. Dr. Gleispach, for Class III Prof. Dr. Hueck. The Department for Legal Research published the series of publications, the working reports and the yearbook of the Academy for German Law and from 1941 also "Das deutsche Rechtsschrifttum". She was also in charge of the quarterly "Deutsche Rechtswissenschaft" and the collection of non-German penal codes. Within the framework of the department there was a committee for the examination of the law study regulations, which in 1939 presented its results to the Reich Ministry for Science, Education and People's Education. In 1940 a fourth class came into being with increasing importance of economic questions, which was responsible for the research of the "national economy" and which was to make the results of economic science accessible to the authorities and offices for the execution of practical tasks. In August 1944, on the instructions of the President, the work of the remaining committees and working groups was discontinued "for the further duration of the war" as well as the promotion of the individual members of special research commissions (letter from Thierack to Lammers of 12 August 1944, BA, R 43 II/1510a). The Academy maintained close contact with foreign countries through its corresponding members. Visits by foreign scientists, students, but also politicians were frequent. In addition, the German sections of various foreign institutions were affiliated to it. On the other hand, efforts were made to expand the Academy's sphere of influence by establishing new companies or maintaining close contact with existing companies in Germany. For the work abroad, there was a separate department in the administration of the Academy, which looked after the associations; as far as purely German organisations were concerned, the support was provided by the specialist departments of the Legal Structuring Department. In the period of its existence the following associations were affiliated to the Academy of German Law: 1. German Section of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences 2. German National Group of the International Law Association 3. German Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property and Copyright 4. International Association for Financial and Tax Law 5. German Society for Financial and Tax Law 6. German Society for Prisoners (affiliated since 1935) 7. Society for Legal and Political Sciences in Vienna 8th Society for German Criminal Law 9th Working Groups: a) for the German-Bulgarian legal relations b) for the German-Italian legal relations c) for the German-Polish legal relations (until 1939) d) for the German-Hungarian legal relations Library and Publications The establishment of a reference library for academics working in the Academy began early on. It was Frank's aim to develop this library into a central collection point for all important legal literature and related areas. The basis was the purchase of the library of the legal historian Prof. Karl von Amira, who died in 1930; later the library of the Munich jurist Prof. Konrad Beyerle was also acquired. Further accesses from various sources, mostly through taxes from authorities (e.g. the library of the former R e i c h s k o l o n i a l a m t , the duplicate holdings of the R e i c h s c h s a r k a m e in Potsdam as well as duplicates of foreign law collections and periodicals from the R e i c h s t a g s a l bibliothek) brought the holdings to around 60,000 publications by 1937. Although the library was primarily intended to serve the Academy, it was basically open to any qualified interested party. An "archive" was attached to the library, which, on Frank's instructions, created 1. a "card index of Jewish legal authors", which "eradicated Jewish literature from the library or from the library". The aim was to remove the works of Jewish authors from all public libraries or libraries serving study purposes and to transfer them to their own departments "which were to indicate the activities of the Jews and the Jewish people"; 2. to edit a card index of general legal writers by author and by work. In addition, a collection of portraits of lawyers, a collection of press clippings on the topics "Law in the Press" and "Academy in the Press" as well as a collection of journal articles from the entire body of jurisprudential literature were in the works. The first library director, Utschlag, also designed a large exhibition on legal history and law in general, which the Academy organized in conjunction with the Faculty of Law of the University of Munich on the occasion of the 1936 Annual Conference in Munich under the title "Das Recht" (The Law). The journal of the Akademie für Deutsches Recht, founded in 1934, provided information on the ongoing work of the Academy and on current legal issues. It was initially supervised by the Academy's own office for writing and finally transferred to the C-H. Becksche Verlagsbuchhandlung in 1937, where it was published until 1944. In addition to detailed reports on the representative events of the Academy (often also as special supplements or commemorative editions), it produced essays, news on organisational changes and the activities of the Academy's working committees, as well as book reviews. In addition, the journal published court decisions of a fundamental nature from 1935 onwards. The decisions were forwarded to the Academy by the courts via the Reich Ministry of Justice. The President acted as editor, the main editor was initially Director Dr. Lasch, then Kammergerichtsrat Dr. Lauterbacher. From 1 January 1939, Deutsche Rechtswissenschaft was published quarterly as the second journal. With the consent of the Reich Minister for Science, Education and Popular Learning, it was transferred from the previous editor Prof. Dr. Karl August Eckhardt to the Department of Legal Research. They brought treatises, contributions and book reviews. The Academy also published the Zeitschrift für Wehrrecht and was involved in the publication of the Zeitschrift der Vereinigung für gewerblichen Rechtsschutz, the Zeitschrift für vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft, the Blätter für Gefängniskunde and the Gerichtssaal. The yearbook of the Academy for German Law should give an overview of the work within one year. It was also published by the President and in its first editions offered a good overview of the most important events in the Academy and its committee work, while later larger treatises on individual issues predominated. In the first years, detailed information on the committee's activities could be obtained from the work reports, which were produced in small print runs using the transfer printing process and were intended only for the confidential information of party offices and authorities and were not to be circulated further. In addition, there was another - public - series of working reports of the Academy for German Law, in which the chairmen published the results of their committees. For more extensive scholarly work that had emerged from the Academy, the series was to serve the Akademie für Deutsches Recht, of which about 80 volumes were published; it was divided into individual groups according to subject areas. Finally, the Academy continued the collection of non-German penal codes organized by the editor of the Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft and published individual writings on special occasions, e.g. on the occasion of the opening of the House of German Law. Financing and assets In his memoirs of 1946, Frank emphasized the financing of the Academy for German Law, which was independent of the "Reich, State, and Party," with which he had hoped to preserve the actual non-partisanship of his institute. In fact, in the first years of its existence, the Academy was almost entirely maintained by donations from third parties, the supporting members, which included both private individuals and business enterprises. The Reichsjustizministerium had also made its approval of the transfer to the Reich dependent on the academy having to carry itself. In the accounting year 1935/36, donations reached the record level of over 1 million RM, and in 1936, 70 donors raised just over 500,000 RM. This was sufficient to cover the expenses, especially since the Reich Ministry for Science, Education and Popular Education had made available a one-time sum of 250,000 RM for the promotion of scientific work. On the other hand, already in 1937, despite a donation volume of almost 700,000 RM by 94 donors, there was a shortfall which had to be covered by donations for the accounting year 1938. In March 1938, General Director Arendts, the Treasurer of the Academy, declared in a meeting with the responsible adviser of the Reich Ministry of Finance, in which also Director Lasch took part, "that the Academy would strive for its entire budget of about 750 - 800,000 RM to be gradually fully supported by contributions from the Reich over the course of about three years," and justified this with the "aim of developing it into a legislative institution of the Reich. In its audit report for the years 1936-1937 of 24 March 1939, the Court of Audit of the German Reich also took the view that a continuation of the previous method of financing was not compatible with the reputation of the Reich; it was the duty of the Reich to "place the financing of the tasks on a sound basis" (BA, R 2/24103). This became indispensable after the Reich Minister of the Interior, in agreement with the deputy Führer, finally rejected a collection permit for the Academy in July 1939 on the basis of the Collection Act of 5 November 1934. This also meant that advertising had to be discontinued for which the company had used its own advertising specialist. In the accounting year 1939/40, the donations fell to 290,000 RM, and for the first time a subsidy from the Reich of about 480,000 RM was granted towards the running costs, so that these were now predominantly borne by the Reich. Although in 1940/41 the income from donations increased again somewhat, the donations already received for 1942 were transferred to the Dankspendenstiftung des Deutschen Volkes on Thierack's instructions. The Academy for German Law was now financed entirely from the Reich's budget. The Akademie für Deutsches Recht used considerable financial resources to provide representative accommodation. On 6 June 1935, the Lachmann-Mosse trust administration acquired the house and property at Leipziger Platz 15 from a foreclosure sale for the Berlin office at a price of RM 1.25 million. Of the purchase amount, one million RM was raised by eight mortgages of a group of insurance institutions, for which the Reich took over the interest and redemption service at the expense of the budget of the Reich Ministry of Justice; this was the reason for the amendment of the statutes that, in the event of the dissolution of the Academy, its assets would fall to the Reich. The annual contribution to be paid by the Reich was 50,000 RM for a period of 25 years. The remaining purchase price of 250,000 RM was to be paid interest-free in five annual instalments of 50,000 RM, which were to be raised from donations. Much more elaborate was the construction of a "House of German Law" at the Academy's headquarters in Munich. The first plans from January to June 1936 provided for three components, for which over 5.3 million RM were estimated. In the course of the negotiations, the mammoth project shrank to two construction phases. On October 24, 1936, on the occasion of the second annual conference of the Academy, Reichsminister Rust laid the foundation stone for Building I, front building and reading hall. The costs were to amount to RM 2,2 million, raised by a loan from the Reich Insurance Institution for Employees, the interest and repayment service of which was taken over by the Reich. Already on 31 October 1937 the academy could celebrate the topping-out ceremony, on 13 May 1939 the opening of the building unit I. The former Max-Joseph-Stift, which was to be renovated and extended by a festival hall, was acquired as Building II for a price of more than RM 1.3 million; in June 1938, the Reichsversicherungsanstalt took out a further loan of RM 2.2 million, the remainder of which was frozen at RM 900,000, however, when construction work was stopped after the outbreak of the war. Administration and registry The administrative apparatus of the Academy gradually developed from July 1934. Initially, most of the service operations were carried out in the Berlin office building; in addition, there was a small office mainly for the construction of the planned extensive library at the headquarters in Munich. It was only after the completion of Building I of the House of German Law in 1939 that the construction of a larger, structured office began, the management of which was placed in the hands of a speaker of its own. According to the rules of procedure, which the Academy submitted to the Reich Ministry of Justice in September 1935 (BA, R 22/198), the administration was divided into departments, headed by a speaker, assisted by an assistant. The speakers were assessors or younger officials on leave in the starting positions of their careers, provided they had knowledge of economics. The president used a presidential chancellery as his personal office. The management of the entire service operation was the responsibility of the Director of the Academy, who had a personal consultant at his disposal. The Director was also in charge of the Organisation Division, which was responsible for the preparation and implementation of the events. The office service was headed by a personnel officer who, in addition to personnel processing, was also in charge of registry and law offices, house and property administration as well as budget monitoring tasks. Other speakers assisted the committee chairmen of the Legal Department, generally one for four committees. In contrast, only assistants were assigned to the secretaries of the three research classes. For the entire financial and asset management, the preparation of the budget, the cash and bookkeeping, accounting, for the conclusion of contracts and the remaining budget management, the treasurer provided the necessary forces free of charge with the exception of an advertising expert and an assistant. The foreign department, which in addition to maintaining foreign contacts also supervised foreign publications, the exchange of journals and literature and the management of the affiliated international societies and associations, was relatively well staffed with a speaker and his deputy, a scientific assistant, an interpreter and a (part-time) unskilled worker for Slavic languages. The administrative regulations of the Academy of 1937 combined the previous organizational forms into nine administrative offices, which in January 1938 comprised one to seven departments, depending on the area of responsibility. These units corresponded to the previous departments. The most extensive was the Administrative Office for Legal Structuring with seven units (I - VII). The administrative office for magazines and press had two (X, XI), the others (legal research, libraries and international transport) had only one each (VIII, IX, XII), as did the administrative offices for cash and accounting (XIV), organisation (XV) and human resources and law firms (XIII), which, however, were also grouped under a central unit. In addition, there was a unit XVI (Legal Office) as the "Legal Office of the ADR". This organization continued to exist in principle even during the war, but with the resulting drastic personnel restrictions, which in the beginning practically paralyzed the entire academy apparatus, but later allowed it to remain in operation. After the closure of the Academy's work, whose offices were moved to the Reich Ministry of Justice building at Wilhelmstraße 65 on 10 January 1944, most of the staff was released at the end of 1944, but parts (finance) continued to work until March 1945. The files produced during the Academy's activities were initially kept in so-called departmental registries, i.e. the written records of the individual speakers. It was not until 1938 that the at least partial compilation of the written material produced so far began in a central registry. The consultant responsible for the law firm was in charge of the execution. At first, the registry business of the Legal Department was taken over, later that of the main administrative office (without the personnel files). The Department of Legal Research initially refrained from handing over its records to the Central Registry. The registry of the foreign department remained independent. Nothing significant could be ascertained about later changes in the registry system. During the establishment of the House of German Law in Munich, a registry was also set up there. It is certain that since the merger of the registries in 1938 the corresponding files have been filed according to a uniform and systematically structured file plan. As of 1940, this plan (BA, R 61/34) comprised seven main areas divided into three groups and sub-groups. The file plan was structured according to the decimal system with four-digit digits, to which an additional digit and a year could be added by slash if necessary. In addition to the documents produced in the course of administrative activities, an extensive complex of documents, characteristic of the Academy and its work, has emerged in the form of minutes of meetings of the committees and other specialist bodies, some of which are based on extensive stenographic notes. Copies were kept in the registry and in the "archive" of the magazines and press department. They form the most important part of the stock. Timetable on the history of the Academy 1933 June 26 Constitution in the Bavarian Ministry of Justice September 22 Granting of the rights of a public corporation in Bavaria by Bavarian law October 2 Ceremonial proclamation of the Academy for German Law at the German Lawyers' Day in Leipzig November 5 1st 1st plenary session in Berlin 1934 January 1st opening of the Berlin offices January 29th 2nd plenary session March 17th 3rd plenary session May 26th founding of the journal of the Academy for German Law 26th founding of the journal of the Academy for German Law in Berlin June 1st Annual Meeting in Munich, at the same time 4th plenary session July 11 elevation to public corporation of the Reich by Reich Law August 9 appointment of Dr. Hans Frank, former leader of the Academy, as President November 13 5th plenary session in Berlin November 18-22 trip to Bulgaria Frank December 19 appointment of Frank as Reich Minister without portfolio 1935 February 27 6th plenary session June 26-28 2nd Annual Meeting with ceremony in the presence of Hitler, at the same time session 21 August Celebratory session on the occasion of the XI International Congress on Criminal Law and Prison Law, also 8th plenary session 15 October Inauguration of the building in Berlin, Leipziger Platz 15 16 October Amendment to the Statutes 30 November 9 plenary session 1936 28 February 10 plenary session 12-17 March Poland trip Frank at the invitation of the University of Warsaw 2-8 April Visit Frank to Rome 2 June Celebratory session on the occasion of the International Congress on Industrial Property 21-24 October 3rd Annual Meeting, also 11th plenary session May 17 Opening of the Chair of German Law at the University of Sofia by Director Lasch June 19 Constituting the Department of Legal Research of the Academy of German Law (with 1st class session) October 28-31 4th 4th Annual Meeting in Munich, also 13th plenary session and event of the Association of Foreign Friends of the Academy of German Law 2nd Annual Meeting in Munich, at the same time 13th plenary session and event of the Association of Foreign Friends of the Academy of German Law at the University of Sofia. November Foundation of the Association for German-Italian Legal Relations December Competition: "State and Party in Italy" 1938 1 June Opening of a series of guest lectures at the University of Vienna 16-18 June 5th Annual Conference in Munich, at the same time 14th Plenary Session 1939 13 May Inauguration of the House of German Law July Prohibition on further donations 12 October Appointment of Frank as Governor General for the Occupied Polish Territories 13 October Appointment of Director Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Lasch becomes district governor in Radom and is represented by Dr. Gaeb 1940 10 January Establishment of the IV class (research of the national economy) in the Department of Legal Research 22-24 November 7th Annual Conference in Munich with plenary session 1942 9. June to July 21 Speeches by Frank in Berlin, Vienna, Munich and Heidelberg against the police state August 20 Dismissal of Frank as President and Appointment of the Reich Minister of Justice Dr. Thierack October Resignation of the Deputy President Prof. Dr. Emge 3. November State Secretary Dr. Rothenberger appointed Deputy President 1943 9 June Announcement of a new constitution of the Academy for German Law 1944 10-12 January Transfer of the Berlin office to the Reich Ministry of Justice 12 August Closure of all legal-political and scholarly work Inventory description: Inventory history Like many of the holdings of the Federal Archives, the documents of the Academy for German Law are only incompletely handed down and divided as a result of war losses. The division began as early as 1943, when the two offices moved files, books and inventory to smaller towns in the area to protect them from air raids, the Munich office to Altötting, Griesbach and Wegscheid (district court), the Berlin offices primarily to the Feldberg (Mecklenburg), Havelberg, Prenzlau, Zehdenick and probably also Templin storage sites also used by the Reich Ministry of Justice, and the Cochem Castle. Some of the files removed from Berlin were confiscated by Russian troops. Since 1957 they have been in the Central State Archives in Potsdam, where they formed the holdings 30.13 (Overview of the holdings of the German Central Archives 1957, p. 86). This had a volume of 155 volumes from the period 1933-1942, 33 of which refer to the activities of the committees and 31 of which apparently originate from the foreign department of the Academy; the holdings include files of the Association for the Improvement of Prisoners (25 volumes) and the German Society for Prison Science. In the hands of American troops fell, in addition to Munich files, the documents still available in the Berlin office at the end of the war, as well as files that had apparently still been brought from Zehdenick to Thuringia in 1945. Most of this stock was transferred via the Ministerial Collecting Center near Kassel to the World War II Records Division of the American National Archives in Alexandria, Va., where it formed the Record Group 1036 with other German documents. A smaller part was handed over to the Federal Ministry of Justice at the beginning of the 1950s, and the file of lawyers and economists remained with a branch of the US Army in Germany. In Alexandria the files were filmed in 1958 by the American Historical Association and described in 1959 in volume 6 of the Guides to German Records Microfilmed at Alexandria, Va., pp. 14-27. In 1960 this part of the collection was transferred to the Federal Archives, which in 1962 was also able to take over the remaining files from the Federal Ministry of Justice and the aforementioned index. In a final return, the Federal Archives received documents from the Academy in 1973 from the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. Some files of the Committee for German-Italian Legal Relations had been transferred to the Institut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie in Amsterdam after the end of the war; they were also made available to the Federal Archives by the latter in 1974 for further completion of the R 61 collection, which had meanwhile been formed from the existing files. Finally, the Institute for Contemporary History, Munich, which had been able to acquire some of the copies of the minutes of the committee meetings collected in Munich and the reference files of the ordinary professor Dr. jur. Hermann Krause (1939-1944 member of the main committee of the academy), also left its documents to the Federal Archives; and in March 1976, it was able to acquire the reference files of Reg. Dir. a.D. and then member of the board of Deutsche Centralbodenkredit AG, Oesterlink, member of the Mortgage Legal Committee of the Academy, will close a lore gap in this area. Thus all surviving traditions of the Academy for German Law outside the GDR were probably brought together in inventory R 61. In 1990, the part of the archive that had been preserved in the Central State Archives of the GDR was merged with R 61. Archivische Bewertung und Bearbeitung (only old stock R 61, without ZStA 30.13) The written material of the Akademie für Deutsches Recht consists essentially of two parts which are already clearly separated from each other. In addition to an extensive collection of factual and correspondence files, the "Archive" of the Press and Periodicals Office contains a considerable part of the collection of minutes and minutes of meetings, some of which can also be found in the files of the Legal Department. From 1938, with a few exceptions, the Academy's documents were filed in a central registry according to a systematic file plan. The filing was done chronologically from bottom to top, but was often disturbed afterwards. In order to eliminate the - often severe - irregularities and to improve the usability of the holdings, all subject units and individual processes were placed in an official filing system (from top to bottom) when the holdings in the Federal Archives were organized and listed in 1967, and torn file units were reunited in the process. Loose written material was reformed after factual matters. The files are therefore no longer in the same condition as they were when they were filmed in the USA, so that an identity between the volumes with the American signatures ADR 1 to ADR 238, some of which also referred to documents of other provenances, and the volumes signed in the Federal Archives exists only rarely; as far as possible, however, the corresponding American signatures were noted, and in addition the concordance between the signatures of the Federal Archives and the role designations of the microfilm T-82 (below pp. 87-90) makes a comparison possible. Cassations were primarily carried out in subject groups, most of which have been preserved in their entirety in the Federal Archives. In addition to the removal of numerous duplicates, administrative documents in particular were freed from all insignificant correspondence. Most of the submissions to committees on private legal matters of no general importance were also largely destroyed. Since the records and minutes were originally also available in the registry of the Academy, the reorganization of the status quo, which is not, moreover, based on the old file plan scheme, attempted to restore the old unit of records and minutes of the individual committees and other working bodies of the Academy of German Law as far as possible, whereby the internal "provenance" (registry or "archive") in the file directory is expressed only by the old signature. The records filed in the registry shall bear the letter "P" in front of the file number, unless they are in correspondence, and the "archive" copies shall not bear a signature. In order to indicate the separation of the holdings into the partial provenances of Berlin and Munich, the place of origin has also been entered in the Remarks column, as far as determined. In addition, the structure of the holdings in simplified form is based on the structure of the Academy. Content characterisation: Part 1 (formerly: ZStA, 30.13): Legal bases, organisation, service administration, librarianship and Veröffentli‧chungen 1933-1945 (68), Jurisprudence - Department of Legal Research 1936-1945 (47), Legal Policy - Department of Legal Structuring General committee files 1935-1943 (6), individual committees 1933-1944 (365) Part 2 (formerly: BArch, R 61): Committees 1933-1940 (36), foreign countries 1934-1942 (34), international congresses, conferences 1935-1941 (16), journal of the Academy for German Law 1935-1939 (10), Sitzungsan‧gelegenheiten, invitations, minutes 1935-1939 (7), reference files, internals, individual items 1934-1944 (26), association for the improvement of prisoners 1934-1942 (26), German Ge‧sellschaft for prison science 1927-1939 (7) state of development: Publication Findbuch: Werhan, Walter; Fensch, Elsa: Akademie für Deutsches Recht (fonds R 61) (Findbücher zu Bestände des Bundesarchivs, Bd. 9), 2nd up, Koblenz 1976; find card index citation method: BArch, R 61/...

BArch, R 19 · Fonds · 1917-1945
Part of Federal Archives (Archivtektonik)

History of the Inventor: Established in June 1936 by Heinrich Himmler's decree as Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police; the Main Office was responsible for the administrative and protective police (including traffic and water police), the gendarmerie, the municipal and Feuerschutzpoli‧zei police, and the Technical Emergency Aid Long text: Overview of the internal official organization of the Main Office Ordnungspolizei The Law on the Reconstruction of the Reich of 30 June 1936 provides for a comprehensive overview of the internal administrative organization of the Main Office. Jan. 1934 (RGBl. I,75) the police sovereignty rights of the countries were transferred to the Reich. As a result, a police department (III) was established in the Reich Ministry of the Interior on May 1, 1934, which, after the merger of the Reich Ministry of the Interior with the Prussian Ministry of the Interior in November 1934, was united with the police department (II) of the latter. Organizationally, this development came to an end on 17 June 1936 with the appointment of Heinrich Himmler as "Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police in the Reich Ministry of the Interior" (RGBl. I,487). By decree of 26 June 1936 (MBliV, 946), the Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police divided his authority into the main offices of Ordnungspolizei and Sicherheitspolizei and subordinated them to their own bosses. The head of the Ordnungspolizei was Kurt Daluege, the former head of the police department of the Reich and Prussian Ministry of the Interior, who became ministerial director and SS-Obergruppenführer (most recently general colonel of the police and SS-Oberstgruppenführer). On 31 August 1943 he was replaced by the General of Police and Waffen-SS Alfred Wünnenberg (m.d.F.b.) until the end of the war. The administrative police, the protective police (including traffic and water police), the gendarmerie, the municipal police, the fire police and the technical emergency aid belonged to the department of the order police. The Main Office of the Ordnungspolizei was divided into "offices", of which there were initially only two: the Office of Administration and Law (VuR) and the Command Office (Kdo). The Administration and Law Office was responsible for handling all administrative police, legal and economic tasks of the entire Ordnungspolizei. Until the end of 1938, it was divided into departments, then into official groups, groups, sub-groups and subject areas. In the course of the organisational changes in the main office of the Ordnungspolizei it was dissolved in September 1943 (see below) and was headed by Ministerialdirektor Bracht until 1943. The command office dealt with all management and other general service matters of the order police. It was initially divided into offices and, since the end of 1940, into groups of offices according to the military model, etc. such as the Office of Administration and Law. From September 1943 there were special inspections at the Command Office for the technical fields of work (communication and motor vehicle systems, weapons and equipment) as well as for veterinary, air-raid protection and fire-fighting matters. The heads of the office were Lieutenant General von Bomhard (until October 1942), Lieutenant General Winkelmann (until March 1944), Major General Diermann (until July 1944) and Major General Flade (until May 1945). These two core offices of the Ordnungspolizei main office were joined by two other offices in the course of 1941. By circular decree of the Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police of 14 January 1941, the Colonial Police Office was established in preparation for the colonial deployment of the Ordnungspolizei. However, it lost its importance with the deterioration of the military situation in 1943 and was dissolved in March 1943 by order of the Führer. On 9 May 1941, the Fire Brigades Office was formed as the fourth office and on 30 December 1941, the Technical Emergency Assistance Office was formed as the fifth office in the Ordnungs- Polizei main office. Fundamental changes in the organization of the Ordnungspolizei main office occurred after Himmler's appointment as Reich Interior Minister (August 1943). With effect from 15 September 1943, the offices of Administration and Law, Fire Brigades and Technical Emergency Aid were dissolved. The tasks of the Office of Administration and Law were mainly transferred to the two new bodies, the Economic Administration Office and the Legal Office. However, the legal office was dissolved at the beginning of December 1943. The majority of his areas of work came to the Office of Economic Administration. By the end of the war, this office had essentially taken over the tasks and position of the old administration and law office again. Its chief became the SS-Obergruppenführer and general of the Waffen-SS and police August Frank from the SS-Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt. Most of the areas previously dealt with by the Fire Brigades and Technical Emergency Aid Offices fell to the Command Office, parts also to the newly formed "Reichsämter" Volunteer Fire Brigades and Technical Emergency Aid. The designation "Reichsamt" expressed the special character of these organizations as public corporations. As an office directly subordinated to the head of the Ordnungspolizei, the Sanitäts-Amt, which was detached from the Kommando-Amt (Amtsgruppe III) on 1 Oct. 1944, is to be mentioned. Relocation measures during the war (For this and the following section compare: Jürgen Huck; alternative places and file fate of the main office Ordnungspolizei in the 2nd World War in: Neufeldt, Huck, Tessin: Zur Geschichte der Ordnungspolizei 1936 - 1945; Koblenz 1957) Until 1942, most of the Ordnungspolizei main office was housed in the old office building of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior in Berlin NW 7, Unter den Linden 72/74. In the course of the year 1942, the office administration and law was transferred to Berlin-Halensee, Kurfürstendamm 106/107. His successor, the Wirtschaftsverwaltungsamt, had to leave the building as a result of bombing and in February 1944 moved into an office building in Berlin-Lichterfelde, Unter den Eichen 126, together with the official groups I (Economy) and III (Accommodation) and the group "Personnel". The official group II (administration) sat in the barracks camp in Berlin-Zehlendorf, Potsdamer Chaussee, and the official group IV (supply and law) in the building Unter den Linden 72/74 until its dissolution in February 1944. At the end of March 1944, after parts of the group "Personal" and the official group II had already gone to Biesenthal, the entire economic administration office was transferred to the alternative camp "Heidenberg" near Biesenthal/Mark in the district of Oberbarnim. After the air raid of 23/24 November 1943 had severely damaged the building Unter den Linden 72/74, the Kommando Office was transferred to the barracks of the alternative camp "Paula" near Biesenthal in December 1943. Only the inspection L (Luftschutz) remained in the service building in Berlin, Schadowstraße 2, until April 20, 1945. The inspection Feuerschutzpolizei (in the Offiziersschule der Ordnungspolizei in Eberswalde), parts of the inspection Veterinärwesen (in Cottbus) and parts of the personnel groups (in the Offiziersschule der Ordnungspolizei in Berlin-Köpenick) were accommodated elsewhere. The group "War History" was transferred to the Waffenschule der Ordnungspolizei in Dresden-Hellerau in August 1943 and one year later to the castle of Prince Carl von Trauttmannsdorff in Bischofteinitz near Taus (Bohemia). On the other hand, the parts of the motor vehicle inspection initially transferred to Dresden were moved to Biesenthal in November 1944, so that this inspection was closed in the "Paula" camp until April 1945. In March 1945, the relocation to Potsdam-Babelsberg was ordered for the offices of the Chief of Ordnungspolizei in and around Berlin. As a result of the rushing war events, this and other projects (Suhl and Weimar) could not be carried out. At the end of March/beginning of April 1945 it was therefore decided to divide the main office of the Ordnungspolizei into a south and a north staff. The division of services between the two staffs is opaque. The mass, however, has been assigned to the south staff. In the 2nd half of April, the "Süd" task force moved to the officers' school of the Ordnungspolizei in Fürstenfeldbruck. A large part of his staff was dismissed here. On April 28, 1945, the miniaturized working staff drove to Eben/Achensee (Tyrol) and was captured by the Americans in mid-May 1945 in Rottach-Egern (Tegernsee). The "North" task force left Biesenthal on 18 April 1945, reached Flensburg via Lübeck at the beginning of May and was captured there by the English at the Harriesleefeld fire brigade school. Inventory description: Inventory history Reference: Koblenz Inventory Fate of the files of the Main Office Ordnungspolizei The mass of files of the Chief of Ordnungspolizei must be considered lost. The processes that led to this loss are still largely in the dark. We are relatively well informed about the fate of larger parts of the old registries of the Chief of the Ordnungspolizei, which mainly contained files of the former police departments of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and the Reich Ministry of the Interior as well as those of the Prussian State Police dissolved in 1935/36, and about the files of the group "War History". The old registries of the Chief of the Ordnungspolizei were located in the so-called "Archive of the Main Office of the Ordnungspolizei", which was renamed "Aktenverwaltung des Hauptamtes Ordnungspolizei" from October 1941 on the objection of the General Director of the State Archives. During the war, the holdings of this file administration can be found in the service buildings Unter den Linden, Kurfürstendamm and Breitestraße. From 1941 to 1944, about 8,500 volumes of files from the police department registries of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, taken over by the head of the Ordnungspolizei, were handed over to the Prussian Secret State Archives in Berlin-Dahlem. The Secret State Archives had for the most part outsourced these files to Central German mines. From there, together with the other outsourced holdings, they probably came to the Central State Archives II of the GDR in Merseburg. Files of unknown size of the police department of the Reich Ministry of the Interior, mainly through the Schutz- und Kriminalpolizei-, which had been taken over by the head of the Ordnungspolizei in 1936, arrived in 1941/42 from the Hauptamt Ordnungspolizei to the Reichsarchiv in Potsdam, where they were most probably destroyed by the air raid of 14./15. 4. 1945. The files of the Prussian State Police from 1933 to 1935, which were transferred to the Wehrmacht in 1935, appear to have been transferred to the Army Archives in Potsdam during the war. Here they were probably burned as a result of the air raid of April 1945. Far more incomplete than the old registries are our knowledge about the fate of the current registries at the Main Office Ordnungspolizei. At the end of the war the following registrations have to be proved: O - Adjutantur O - HB Head Office O - Jurist O - Kdo Adjutantur O - Kdo WF Weltanschauliche Führung O - Kdo Org/Ia Organisation, Einsatz, Führung O - Kdo I - Ib Nachschuf O - Kdo I Ausb Ausbildung O - Kdo I Sp. Sport O - Kdo I KrG War History O - Kdo II P O - Kdo II P Allg) Personal Data O - Kdo II P R 1) O - Kdo II P Disciplinary Matters 2) O - Kdo II P KrO War Orders and Decorations of Honor 3) O - Kdo In K Inspection Motor Vehicles 4) O - Kdo In N Inspection Communications 5) O - Kdo In WG Inspection Weapons and Appliances 6) O - Kdo In L inspection air raid protection 7) O - Kdo In F inspection fire police 8) O - Kdo In Vet inspection veterinary 9) O - W personal data 10) O - W verse supply 11) O - W I economy 12) O - W II administration and law 13) O - W III accommodation 14) O - medical 15) O - I. - S Inspector General of the Schutzpolizei O - I. - G Inspector General of the Gendarmerie and Schutzpolizei der Gemeinden 16) O - I. - Sch Inspector General of the Schools O - I. - FSchP Inspector General for Fire-fighting 17) (Fire Police and Fire Brigades) O - I. - FwSch Inspector General for Firefighting 18) extinguishing system (fire schools, factory fire brigades and fire show) 19) O - RTN Reichsamt Technische Nothilfe 20) O - RFw Reichsamt Freiwillige Feuerwehren 21) Secret registry Most of these 35 running registries seem to have been completely lost. Only the following incomplete news about their whereabouts have become known to the Federal Archives so far. A part of the personnel files of the command office (registries O-Kdo II P) seems to have been moved in 1943/44 in agreement with the Reichsamt Technische Nothilfe to the castle Eisenhardt in Belzig/Mark (TN school). His fate is unknown. Another part came in spring 1945 first to the police administration Gera, then to Weimar or Gschenda, Kr. Arnstadt, was temporarily brought back to Biesenthal and went in April 1945 with the south staff to Fürstenfeldbruck. Already in Biesenthal the mass of files about the law for civil servants burned, and further losses entered on the march from there to Fürstenfeldbruck by low-flying fire. In Fürstenfeldbruck and at the beginning of May 1945 in Eben, the mass of the files carried along by members of the South Staff was burned. The personnel files of the Economic Administration Office (registry O-W Pers.) were moved to Thuringian towns together with those of the Commando Office in the spring of 1945. They arrived via the police administration in Gera at the Linda police supply camp near Neustadt a. d. Orla - according to other news also to Gschwenda - and returned to Biesenthal for a short time when the Americans arrived, after considerable parts had been burned in Thuringia due to a misunderstood radio message. From there, they were taken to Fürstenfeldbruck by the hourly staff in April 1945, losing their lives in air raids. Here and in Eben, most of the files were destroyed at the end of April/beginning of May 1945. According to other sources, however, it was burned in Maurach/Achensee at the beginning of May 1945 according to further files. A special fate had the files of the group "War History" of the command office (registry O-Kdo I KrG). In the course of the war, a "special archive" had been created for the group through the release of material from the area of the Ordnungspolizei that was important for the history of the war. Among its best sands, the diaries of the SS Police Division established in 1939, the 35th SS (Police) Grenadier Division established in 1945, the SS Police Regiments, the Police Shooting Regiments, the police battalions and other police troop units, as well as a collection of the most important decrees of the Main Office of the Ordnungspolizei (Ordnungspolizei - Ordnungspolizei - Order Police Department) are to be emphasized. These valuable documents were completely destroyed at the end of April/beginning of May 1945 by members of the group "War History" in Bischofteinitz/Bohemia. It is still unclear to what extent the records of the chief of the Ordnungspolizei are kept today by GDR offices. It is only certain that the holdings "Reichsministerium des Innern" of the Central State Archives I in Potsdam under Dept. III contain 46 volumes about the police from the period 1934 to 1937 and personnel files from the main office of the Ordnungspolizei. The remains of the personnel group registries not destroyed in Fürstenfeldbruck and Eben, and apparently also parts of other registries of the Main Office Ordnungspolizei, were confiscated by the Americans. After the occupation of the Offiziersschule der Ordnungspolizei in Fürstenfeldbruck, the police inspected the files they had found, took them to a warehouse, transported them away in the autumn of 1945, leaving behind the person of no interest to them. The material remaining there from the personnel registry of the Economic Administration Office was transferred directly to the Federal Archives in November 1954 via the Bavarian Main State Archives, Dept. I, that of the Command Office in January 1955 and in July 1957 from the Bavarian Police School Fürstenfeldbruck. As early as December 1956, about 550 personnel notebooks of the Kommando-Amtes with the initial letters M - Z had arrived here, which, initially confiscated, had been handed over by the American military government to the Command of the Schutzpolizei in Wiesbaden in 1949 and there - with a stock of originally about 900 notebooks - had been reduced by the handing over of documents about reused police personnel to their office. The main mass of the removed files, however, was first transferred to the file depot of the U.S. Army (Departmental Records Branch) in Alexandria/Virginia and filmed within the Records Group 1010/EAP 170 - 175 (Microfilm Guide 39). The transfer from there to the Federal Archives took place in April 1962. Further file takeovers took place from documents that had initially been brought together in the Document Center in Berlin - first in 1957 personal files on gendarmerie officials via the Hessian Ministry of the Interior, then in 1962 on a larger scale and directly in connection with the so-called Schumacher Collection of documents from various organizational units and at about the same time Daluege's reconstructed files from biographical materials of the Adjutantur of the Chief of Ordnungspolizei. Other provenances that have been grouped according to biographical criteria can still be found in the Berlin Document Center. In the summer of 1957, the former chief of the command office, Lieutenant General of the Ordnungspolizei a. D. Adolf v. Bomhard, two volumes of files personally secured by him (R 19/282 and 283) and, in addition, the documents listed under C in the Annex. 1958 followed tax, salary and wage documents of former employees of the main witness office of the Ordnungspolizei of the Versorgungsanstalt des Bundes und der Länder in Karlsruhe. Finally, files of the Reich Office Voluntary Fire Brigades were handed over by the Oberfinanzdirektion Hamburg in 1957 and 1964. Archival evaluation and processing Reference: Koblenz stock In view of the insignificance or absence of other records handed down by the police and the need under pension law for proof of service time for members of the police force, a thorough cassation was dispensed with. On the other hand, in order to fill at least some of the gaps in the status quo, not only the official printed matter of the Main Office Ordnungspolizei was listed, but also important matters concerning the Ordnungspolizei from the holdings of the Federal Archives R 43 (Reich Chancellery), R 18 (Reich Ministry of the Interior), R 2 (Reich Ministry of Finance), R 22 (Reich Ministry of Justice), NS 19 (Personal Staff Reichsführer SS), NS 7 (SS and Police Jurisdiction) and R 36 (Deutscher Gemeindetag (German Community Day) were incorporated, without the aim of completeness. On the other hand, the stocks R 20 (chief of the gang combat units; schools of the order police) and R 70 (police services of integrated, affiliated and occupied areas of the 2nd world war), which must be consulted anyway with appropriate investigations, were completely omitted. When classifying the stock, it was not possible to structure the stock in accordance with the registry principle, given the incomplete nature of the preserved files, any more than it was possible to do a close analogy to the administrative structure of the main office. Therefore, an ideal structure of the competence area of the Main Office Ordnungspolizei was developed which was adapted to the importance of the subject areas actually handed down in the inventory. Dr. Neufeldt, Mr. Huck, Mr. Schatz, Dr. Boberach, Dr. Werner and Mr. Marschall were particularly involved in the chronological order in which the inventory was developed. Koblenz, October 1974 Content characterization: Adjutant of the Chief of Ordnungspolizei 1933-1945 (24), Dienststellenverwaltung 1933-1945 (50), Nachrichten- und Befehlsblätter, Erlasses, Besprechungungen 1933-1945 (41), Orga‧nisation and Zuständigkeit 1933-1945 (58), Haushalt 1933-1944 (9), General service law and police service law 1931-1945 (37), courses and schools 1930-1945 (89), assessment, promotion, secondment and transfer of members of the police 1931-1945 (38), remuneration and pensions 1933-1945 (19), Criminal and disciplinary matters 1937-1945 (8), uniforms and orders 1933-1945 (8), Comradeship Association of German Police Officers 1933-1945 (6), personnel statistics 1938-1945 (7), accommodation, equipment and armament 1933-1945 (8), Sanitäts- und Vete‧rinärwesen, Polizeisport 1933-1945 (12), Polizeiverwaltungs- und Vollzugsdienst 1935-1945 (93), Einsatz von Polizeiverbände und -einheiten 1933-1945 (108), Personalakte 1917-1945 (1.067), State Hospital of Police in Berlin. Medical records (ZX) of patients 1940-1945 (1946) (3,149), file of the State Hospital of Police in Berlin (n.a.) State of development: Findbuch (1974) Citation method: BArch, R 19/...

BArch, R 43-I · Fonds · 1919-1945
Part of Federal Archives (Archivtektonik)

History of the Inventory Designer: The Constitution of the German Reich of 16 April 1871, as well as the Constitution of the North German Confederation of 1867, contained no more detailed provisions on the design of the Reich Administration. Only the Reich Chancellor was the only responsible minister of the German Reich with constitutional rank. How he should fulfil his duties and tasks, on the other hand, remained largely undefined and left to the concrete will of the respective office holder. Because of this constitutional indeterminacy, the Reich level of the administration of the German Empire was bound to the character of the improvised and sometimes also the unstable until the end of the German Empire. At first it actually seemed as if Bismarck, as the only minister of the Reich, wanted to work with only one central, unified administrative authority. The Federal Chancellery, on whose organisation its later President Rudolf Delbrück had exerted considerable influence, began its work in 1867 as the office of the Federal Chancellor and was continued in the expansion of the North German Confederation into the German Reich under the name of the Reich Chancellery. The responsibilities of the Office were comprehensive and included the function of an office for the standing committees of the Federal Council, the handling of the revenues and expenditures of the Confederation and the preparation of the presidential bills. With the foundation of the German Reich, the Imperial Chancellery also took over the direct administration of the Reichsland Alsace-Lorraine and the Reichseisenbahnen. Karl Hofmann, the President of the Reich Chancellery, was instructed by decree of 6 August 1877 to prepare for the creation of a special office which would take care of all the affairs of the Reich Chancellor for which he had "previously used forces of the Foreign Office for spatial reasons". Hofmann's submission of 29 Nov. 1877 then also provided for the establishment of such a central office under the designation "Special Office of the Reich Chancellor", but placed this office in the budget of the Reich Chancellery. However, Hofmann did not succeed in this attempt to fortify the position of his office again. Although Bismarck agreed with Hofmann's proposals concerning the internal organisation and salary classification of the staff in his new office, he changed the name of the new post to "Centralbureau" on the basis of his own hand. More important than this change in the nomenclature, however, was the fact that Bismarck, by decree of 16 December 1877, called on Hofmann to draw up a special budget for an independent authority not incorporated into the Imperial Chancellery. The draft of a "Budget for the Imperial Chancellor and his Central Office for the Budget Year 1878/79" provided funds for the salaries of a speaking council, an expediting secretary, a clerical secretary and a clerical servant. The new authority was to take its seat in the former Palais Radziwill in Wilhelmstraße 77; the Imperial Chancellor was also to move into an official residence there. Bismarck requested with Immediatbericht of 16 May 1878 from Wilhelm I. the permission for the constitution of the new office, which should be called Reich Chancellery, because this designation might correspond "most exactly to the position and the tasks of the same". Christoph von Tiedemann, who had been Bismarck's closest collaborator since 1876 and was therefore familiar with the habits of the Reich Chancellor to the best of his ability, became head of the Reich Chancellery. Under his leadership, the Reich Chancellery actually developed into a political relay station in the centre of the political decision-making structure, whose function was also recognised by the State Secretaries of the Reich Offices. Under constitutional law, the Reich Chancellery was never more than the office of the Reich Chancellor, which "had to mediate the official dealings of the latter with the heads of the individual departments". The office character is expressed not least in the official rank of the head of the Reich Chancellery and the very limited staff until the end of the imperial era. It was not until 1907 that the head of the Reich Chancellery was elevated to the rank of Undersecretary of State and thus placed on an equal footing with the senior officials of the Reich Offices. Although the number of employees grew from originally four in 1878 to 19 in 1908 and continued to rise to 25 in 1918 due to the requirements of the First World War, the Reich Chancellery never even came close to the number of staff of a Reich Office. The private and representative affairs of the Reich Chancellor were handled by the special office of the Reich Chancellor, which continued to reside in the Foreign Office even after the establishment of the Reich Chancellery. With the beginning of the First World War, a joint branch office of the Reich Chancellery and the Foreign Office was established at the Great Headquarters under the name "Formation Reichskanzler und Auswärtiges Amt". This branch existed until the end of the war. A permanent representative was here to represent the interests of the Reich Chancellor when he was in Berlin. In the Reich Chancellery, on the other hand, the Undersecretary of State ran the business if the Reich Chancellor was in the headquarters. In February 1917 a permanent representative of the Reich Chancellor was installed at the Supreme Army Command in order to get a better grip on the continuing disagreements between Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg and the 3rd Supreme Army Command under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. His task was to keep the Supreme Army Command constantly informed about the policy of the Reich Administration. With the forced abdication of Emperor Wilhelm II and the resignation of Reich Chancellor Max von Baden, business was transferred to the Council of People's Representatives on 11 Nov. 1918, which temporarily exercised the function of an imperial government until the government of Philipp Scheidemann took office on 19 February 1919. From 9 November 1918 to 3 March 1919, the head of the Reich Chancellery was the journalist Curt Baake. After the Weimar parliamentary democracy was established, the position of the Reich Chancellor also changed, as did that of the Reich Chancellery. While the Imperial Chancellor was no longer the only Imperial Minister, as he was in the Empire, he, as Chairman of the Imperial Government, determined the political guidelines in accordance with Articles 55 and 56 of the Imperial Constitution, through which he was able to exert a decisive influence on the fate of the Empire. His authority to issue directives was, of course, restricted by constitutional law and political practice to a considerable extent, for it had to be brought into line politically with the powers of other organs provided for in the Reich Constitution. These were less the Reichsrat, which as a permanent conference of delegates of the state governments had only limited powers in the field of legislation and administration and whose significance cannot be compared with that of the Bundesrat of the Kaiserreich, than the other two constitutional organs: Reichstag and Reichspräsident. With the change of the position of the Reich Chancellor in the Weimar Republic, the tasks of the Reich Chancellery also increased. The Reich Chancellery remained, as in the imperial period, the office of the Reich Chancellor for his dealings with the constitutional organs, now the Reich President, the Reichstag, the Reich Council and the individual Reich Ministers. The State Secretary in the Reich Chancellery took part in the cabinet meetings, informed the Reich Chancellor about the current fundamental issues of politics as a whole, accompanied him at all important conferences in Germany and abroad, observed the formation of opinion in parliament, the press, coordinated legislative work with the Reich parties on his behalf, and gave a lecture to the Reich Chancellor himself. The Reich Chancellery was also represented by a member in the above-mentioned intergroup meetings, in which the most important decisions of the Cabinet were discussed in advance with the party and parliamentary group leaders. She made sure that, despite the constant tensions in the constantly changing coalitions, the objective work of the Reich's departments continued. he preparation of the collegiate decisions and the reliable monitoring of their implementation, two of the Reich Chancellery's main tasks, was of particular importance in this respect. The necessary consequence of these increased tasks was an increase in the number of departments in the Reich Chancellery from three (as of 1910) to eight (as of 1927) and in the number of civil servants from 20 before the outbreak of the First World War. Formally, the Reich Chancellery had various offices attached to it, which were either directly subordinated to it, such as the Reich Headquarters for Homeland Service, or under the direct control of the Reich Chancellor. When, after the death of the Reich President von Hindenburg, the Reich Chancellor took over the powers and rights of the head of state of the German Reich by the Law of August 1, 1934 - including the supreme command of the Wehrmacht - and thus united the office of Reich President with the office of Reich Chancellor in his person, this also had an effect on his relationship with the Reich government. As head of state, Hitler had the right to appoint and dismiss the Reich Ministers without having to wait for the proposal of the Reich Chancellor, as the Reich President had done. The Reichsminister were therefore completely dependent on him. According to the Reich Law of 16 October 1934 on the Oath of the Reich Ministers and Members of the State Governments, the formula of which was later also incorporated into the German Civil Servants Law of 26 January 1937, they were obliged to loyalty and obedience to him. The Führer principle of the NSDAP now also applied to the Reich government, whose members the "Führer und Reichskanzler," as Hitler was called after the decree to the Reich Minister of the Interior of August 2, 1934, only had to advise in inner-German dealings, but were now also legally obliged to submit to his will in case of a dissenting opinion. This meant that the Reichskabinett was no longer a decision-making body in which the Reich Chancellor could possibly have been majorized, but rather a "Führerrat", which only had to advise the head of government. It was planned to also fix this changed position of the Reich Chancellor vis-à-vis the Reich government in law, an intention which, at Hitler's request, was postponed in the cabinet meeting of 26 January 1937, particularly with regard to foreign countries, until the creation of a new Basic Law. The above-mentioned concentration of state tasks on the Führer and Reich Chancellor naturally also had an effect on the responsibilities of the Reich Chancellery. Thus, for example, the Enabling Act already brought about a certain increase in tasks for them, because the laws passed by the Reich government were no longer to be drawn up and promulgated by the Reich President, but by the Reich Chancellor, and the fewest laws were still passed in the ordinary legislative process, through the Reichstag, but went the second legislative process described above, or were passed as Führer decrees or ordinances - without the participation of the Cabinet. The strengthened position of the head of the Reich Chancellery was conspicuous externally in the fact that the documents of government laws signed by Hitler and co-signed by the participating Reich Minister now always also bore the co-signature of the Reich Minister and head of the Reich Chancellery, who thus assumed responsibility for the proper course of the legislative process. After the establishment of the Council of Ministers for the Defence of the Reich at the end of August 1939, the signature of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers for the Defence of the Reich was also necessary in second place behind that of Hitler. In addition, the head of the Reich Chancellery also signed all the Führer decrees with legislative content and, if necessary - which never occurred - the Reichstag laws and the laws enacted on the basis of the "Volksgesetzgebung" (People's Legislation). The increasing workload of Hitler, who in addition to the powers of the Reich Chancellor and the Reich President also exercised supreme command over the Wehrmacht, meant that the cabinet meetings gradually ceased. In addition, the Reich Chancellor, who could no longer be informed by the Reich Ministers united in the cabinet about the completion of individual tasks in the departments, was increasingly dependent on information from the head of the Reich Chancellery. The task of selecting from the wealth of information supplied and processed those suitable for presentation to the Reich Chancellor and of deciding whether Hitler's intervention in certain matters appeared necessary was therefore the responsibility of the head of the Reich Chancellery, who granted him another key position in the leadership apparatus of the state civilian sector. The Reichsminister also had the opportunity to give individual lectures directly to the Reich Chancellor. But Hitler also made less and less use of this, so that the head of the Reich Chancellery practically advised him alone, which strengthened his position vis-à-vis the specialist ministers, who tried in vain to reach certain agreements among themselves through private meetings, especially towards the end of the war. The office of the Reich President, renamed "Präsidialkanzlei" and renamed "Präsidialkanzlei des Führers und Reichskanzlers" by decree of the Führer and Reich Chancellor of 1 December 1937, remained responsible for the handling of all matters concerning the head of state even after the merger of the offices of the Reich President and the Reich Chancellor.B. the preparation of ceremonial receptions of foreign heads of state, princes and statesmen, the receipt of letters of attestation and recall from foreign diplomats, congratulations and condolences from the head of state, the processing of petitions in matters of grace and the entire title and religious order system. On the other hand, the political affairs in which, in addition to the decision of the Reich government, the decision of the head of the Reich was also necessary, were now taken care of by the Reich Chancellery, as was the preparation of political decisions, which up to then had to be made by the head of state, such as the enactment of organizational decrees, which were now the sole responsibility of the Reich Chancellery. Although the documents of appointment and dismissal for the higher Reich officials were still to be submitted to Hitler for execution by the office of the head of state, i.e. now by the head of the presidential chancellery, the responsible ministers and the Reich Chancellery were responsible for the factual and political preparation. Inventory description: Inventory history The day after the Reich Chancellery was established, on 19 May 1878, the expediting secretary in the Foreign Office, Hans Rudolf Sachse, who shortly afterwards began his service as a registrar in the new Reich authority, presented the draft of a registry order for the Reich Chancellery to the lecturing council of Tiedemann. His "basic features for the book and file keeping at the Reich Chancellery" were obviously based on the experience of the Foreign Office's records administration. The records were initially stored loosely in shelves in the registry, probably lying from the outset in the provided and already inscribed file covers. If a file unit had reached a thickness of 2 - 3 cm, it was provided with a linen back and another dust jacket and formed into a tape by means of thread stitching. This organisation of written records proved to be sufficient and practicable for a long series of years. With the gradual further development of the functions and activities of the Reich Chancellery, and as a result of the development of constitutional law and administrative organization in the Reich and in the federal states, however, it had to appear in need of change over time. At the turn of the century it was therefore decided to introduce a more differentiated file system, which came into force on 1 January 1900. The state's new beginning on 13 February 1919, the day on which Cabinet Scheidemann took office, brought a continuous cut in the registry of the Reich Chancellery. The entire file inventory was transferred to the old filing system and new files were created. The 30th of January meant a noticeable, but not sharp cut in the records administration of the Reich Chancellery. In order to start a new filing layer on this day, numerous files were removed from the current filing system, stapled and repositioned in the old filing system. They were replaced by new volumes. However, this only happened if the running band was filled to some extent anyway; if this was not the case, it was continued. In any case, the band counting began again with the number 1, although the series from the Weimar period continued seamlessly. The file structure, however, was left unchanged, and thread-stitching generally remained the same; standing files were used for the first time only for newly created series. In addition to the files kept in the registry, other records were also handed down by the fact that the Reich Chancellors and senior officials of the Reich Chancellery did not have handwritten records, personal papers, and a large part of their private correspondence filed in the registry, but as a rule kept them in their offices. It was not uncommon for such documents to be taken along when leaving office. Thus the estates of the Reich Chancellors Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Bülow, Hertling and Luther as well as of the chiefs of the Reich Chancellery Rottenburg and Pünder, which are kept in the Federal Archives, almost regularly contain official or semi-official documents in addition to private records, which have arisen from the exercise of official functions. The fact that the files of the Lammers Minister's Office have remained in the inventory is a consequence of their joint outsourcing with the inventory towards the end of the Second World War. In other cases, files of Reich Chancellors and senior officials with material on specific issues, with documents for conferences, meetings, etc., were handed over to the registry for safekeeping as soon as they were no longer needed and assigned to the relevant subject series as supplements. As a result, such hand files are scattered over the inventory, e.g. the hand files for the series "Execution of the Peace Treaty, Reparations" in the group "Foreign Affairs". The secret files of the Reich Chancellery formed another complex of documents separate from the registry holdings, the content, scope and structure of which unfortunately are not known in detail. According to the information available in the Federal Archives, they were probably burned before the end of the war by members of the Reich Chancellery in accordance with the decree of the Reich Minister of the Interior to the Reich Defence Commissioners of 12 October 1944 concerning "Behaviour of the Authorities in the Event of Enemy Occupation"[85] Individual fragments of secret files, which probably accidentally escaped annihilation and were in the inventory, were listed in the present find book at the end of the section "Files of the Minister's Office". In Potsdam, with a few exceptions, there are those old files of the Reich Chancellery from the period 1878 - 1919 which had been removed from the current registry in mid-February 1919 and deposited in an old file file. The Reichsarchiv had only been able to take it over in 1937 or 1938, after earlier efforts in vain. Only the old files of the service administration, including the personnel files, remained in the Authority. During the Second World War, the holdings of the Reich Archives, together with other archival materials, were moved to the Staßfurt salt mine near Magdeburg, where they fell into the hands of the Red Army in 1945. It was taken to the Soviet Union and 10 years later, in July 1955, handed over to the German Central Archive (renamed the "Central State Archive of the GDR" in 1973) in Potsdam. There it formed the inventory 07. 01. The inventory division into four departments was retained. In addition to the former Reichsarchiv holdings, the Central State Archives also kept about 800 individual records of the registry from the years 1933 - 1945, which were presumably found in the Wilhelmstraße office building. The majority of the Reichskanzleiakten from the years 1919 - 1945 as well as the old files of the office administration had been in Berlin only until the last phase of the war. As the situation in and around Berlin worsened, they were relocated to southern Germany, where they were confiscated by American troops in 1945. Via the Ministerial Collecting Center in Hessisch-Lichtenau and Fürstenhagen near Kassel, the central collection point for all material found by the Americans in their occupation zone[90], they reached the Berlin Documents Unit at the beginning of 1946. Here they - like other German files stored there - were evaluated for investigations against leading personalities from the state, the party and other areas of public life in preparation for war crimes trials. During the Berlin blockade in the summer of 1948, the files united in the Documents Unit were transferred to Whaddon Hall near Bletchley in the southern English county of Buckinghamshire. The files of the Reich Chancellery were stored there until 1958 and were provisionally arranged, recorded and selected for filming. In addition to the tradition of the Federal Foreign Office, which is primarily relevant, they also served as the basis for the edition of files on German foreign policy, which was initially edited exclusively by Anglo-Saxon and French historians. These files finally reached the Federal Archives in two transports in December 1958 and January 1959, a remainder at the end of April 1959. Here they form the listed holdings R 43 I, II. Archivische Bearbeitung During the provisional arrangement and indexing of the files of the Reich Chancellery from the years 1919 - 1945 in Whaddon Hall, the editors proceeded from two partial holdings. One of them essentially covered the tradition of the Weimar period, the other mainly the files from the period after 30 January 1933; they were briefly referred to as the "Old" and "New" Reich Chancelleries. As mentioned above, this division had already taken place in January/February 1933 in the Reich Chancellery and had been maintained during the relocation of the files during the war and after their confiscation. In the course of the processing, it was refrained from restoring the consistent arrangement of the file groups in both partial holdings, e.g. according to the alphabet of the group titles as they had existed in the registry of the Reich Chancellery. Only the registry connections within the groups that were presumably largely lost due to frequent relocations of the holdings were taken into account, whereby errors and mistakes were often made due to a lack of familiarity with the registry relationships and the file management of the Reich Chancellery. Nevertheless, it was possible to restore the mass of files to their original order with the help of the old signatures and tape numbers. Less satisfactorily, the classification of the not insignificant remnant of the tradition was resolved, which consisted of files of the minister's office, hand files of officials, secret file fragments, volumes with collections of circulars, circulars and press cuttings, registration aids, etc. Materials of this kind came to various places, especially at the end of both parts of the stock. In each part of the collection, the volumes were numbered consecutively. The distortion was also differentiated between the two partial stocks. The sequential number, the old signature and the runtime were included as formal specifications. In order to identify the contents of the file, the serial title was taken from the inscription of the file as the subject of the thread-stitched volumes, i.e. above all the files of the older part. In the case of standing folders, on the other hand, the titles of the individual transactions were entered in the list, as far as Rotuli was available with the corresponding information, and the subject series title was usually dispensed with. As a result, two very different lists were drawn up in terms of their degree of resolution. In the Federal Archives, these directories served for a long time as exclusive finding aids. This meant that the division into two parts, R 43 I (Old Reich Chancellery) and R 43 II (New Reich Chancellery), was retained. The consecutive numbering carried out in Waddon Hall also remained unchanged, since the files had already frequently been quoted in scientific publications afterwards. For conservation reasons, however, the documents stored in standing files and folders had to be transferred to archive folders; as a rule, two or three or sometimes more volumes were formed from the contents of one folder. This was necessary in order to separate files from various subject series that had been united in the Reich Chancellery and to form handy, not too extensive volumes. The volumes formed from the documents of a standing file, however, retained its serial number and were distinguished by the addition of letters (a, b, c, etc.). Within the volumes, the delimitation of the processes from each other, which had previously been recognizable by filing them in hanging binders, was marked by the insertion of separator sheets. On the other hand it turned out that 84 volumes from R 43 I and 205 volumes from R 43 II could not be separated and destroyed. The largest part (125 volumes) concerned the administration of the Aid Fund and the Disposition Fund of the Reich Chancellor; it consisted of individual files on the acceptance and use of donations from private sources, on the granting or refusal of support, other donations or gifts of honour to private individuals, associations and federations in emergencies, birthdays, anniversaries, events and on the occasion of the assumption of honorary sponsorships by the Reich Chancellor. The corresponding activity of the Reich Chancellery is already documented by several series in the groups "Reich Chancellor" and "Welfare" as well as by a number of files of the minister's office. The second largest group of documents collected (about 120 volumes) were files of the service administration. They mainly contained cash documents, invoices and receipts, company offers, correspondence with individual companies about deliveries and services for the Reich Chancellery as well as irrelevant documents about various house matters. The rest of the non-archival material consisted of volumes with multiple traditions and collections of official printed matter, in a few cases volumes containing only individual transmission letters. Finally, 44 volumes with documents of foreign provenances were removed from the holdings and assigned to other holdings, in some cases also to places outside the house. The majority of the documents are from the Community of Student Associations, which Reichsminister Dr. Lammers managed and whose business he had led through his office. Details are given in the Annex. The maps and plans, which were taken from the files for conservation reasons, were combined in the map archive to an independent group "Plan R 43 II". These are in particular planning breaks for the new building from the years 1943 ff. They are indexed by a separate index. The holdings of the Central State Archives (07.01) and the Federal Archives (R 43) were merged into holdings R 43 following the merger of the two archives in 1990. For the files of the Reich Chancellery from the years 1919 to 1945, a publication index was available since 1984, which also takes into account the files of this epoch kept in the Central State Archives until 1990. For the files of the "Old Reich Chancellery" (1878-1919), the Central State Archives had a finding aid book that had already been compiled in the Reich Archives. State of development: finding aids: publication find book (1984); online find book citation method: BArch, R 43-I/...

BArch, R 43 · Fonds · (1862) 1878-1945
Part of Federal Archives (Archivtektonik)

History of the Inventory Designer: The Constitution of the German Reich of 16 April 1871, as well as the Constitution of the North German Confederation of 1867, contained no more detailed provisions on the design of the Reich Administration. Only the Reich Chancellor was the only responsible minister of the German Reich with constitutional rank. How he should fulfil his duties and tasks, on the other hand, remained largely undefined and left to the concrete will of the respective office holder. Because of this constitutional indeterminacy, the Reich level of the administration of the German Empire was bound to the character of the improvised and sometimes also the unstable until the end of the German Empire. At first it actually seemed as if Bismarck, as the only minister of the Reich, wanted to work with only one central, unified administrative authority. The Federal Chancellery, on whose organisation its later President Rudolf Delbrück had exerted considerable influence, began its work in 1867 as the office of the Federal Chancellor and was continued in the expansion of the North German Confederation into the German Reich under the name of the Reich Chancellery. The responsibilities of the Office were comprehensive and included the function of an office for the standing committees of the Federal Council, the handling of the revenues and expenditures of the Confederation and the preparation of the presidential bills. With the foundation of the German Reich, the Imperial Chancellery also took over the direct administration of the Reichsland Alsace-Lorraine and the Reichseisenbahnen. Karl Hofmann, the President of the Reich Chancellery, was instructed by decree of 6 August 1877 to prepare for the creation of a special office which would take care of all the affairs of the Reich Chancellor for which he had "previously used forces of the Foreign Office for spatial reasons". Hofmann's submission of 29 Nov. 1877 then also provided for the establishment of such a central office under the designation "Special Office of the Reich Chancellor", but placed this office in the budget of the Reich Chancellery. However, Hofmann did not succeed in this attempt to fortify the position of his office again. Although Bismarck agreed with Hofmann's proposals concerning the internal organisation and salary classification of the staff in his new office, he changed the name of the new post to "Centralbureau" on the basis of his own hand. More important than this change in the nomenclature, however, was the fact that Bismarck, by decree of 16 December 1877, called on Hofmann to draw up a special budget for an independent authority not incorporated into the Imperial Chancellery. The draft of a "Budget for the Imperial Chancellor and his Central Office for the Budget Year 1878/79" provided funds for the salaries of a speaking council, an expediting secretary, a clerical secretary and a clerical servant. The new authority was to take its seat in the former Palais Radziwill in Wilhelmstraße 77; the Imperial Chancellor was also to move into an official residence there. Bismarck requested with Immediatbericht of 16 May 1878 from Wilhelm I. the permission for the constitution of the new office, which should be called Reich Chancellery, because this designation might correspond "most exactly to the position and the tasks of the same". Christoph von Tiedemann, who had been Bismarck's closest collaborator since 1876 and was therefore familiar with the habits of the Reich Chancellor to the best of his ability, became head of the Reich Chancellery. Under his leadership, the Reich Chancellery actually developed into a political relay station in the centre of the political decision-making structure, whose function was also recognised by the State Secretaries of the Reich Offices. Under constitutional law, the Reich Chancellery was never more than the office of the Reich Chancellor, which "had to mediate the official dealings of the latter with the heads of the individual departments". The office character is expressed not least in the official rank of the head of the Reich Chancellery and the very limited staff until the end of the imperial era. It was not until 1907 that the head of the Reich Chancellery was elevated to the rank of Undersecretary of State and thus placed on an equal footing with the senior officials of the Reich Offices. Although the number of employees grew from originally four in 1878 to 19 in 1908 and continued to rise to 25 in 1918 due to the requirements of the First World War, the Reich Chancellery never even came close to the number of staff of a Reich Office. The private and representative affairs of the Reich Chancellor were handled by the special office of the Reich Chancellor, which continued to reside in the Foreign Office even after the establishment of the Reich Chancellery. With the beginning of the First World War, a joint branch office of the Reich Chancellery and the Foreign Office was established at the Great Headquarters under the name "Formation Reichskanzler und Auswärtiges Amt". This branch existed until the end of the war. A permanent representative was here to represent the interests of the Reich Chancellor when he was in Berlin. In the Reich Chancellery, on the other hand, the Undersecretary of State ran the business if the Reich Chancellor was in the headquarters. In February 1917 a permanent representative of the Reich Chancellor was installed at the Supreme Army Command in order to get a better grip on the continuing disagreements between Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg and the 3rd Supreme Army Command under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. His task was to keep the Supreme Army Command constantly informed about the policy of the Reich Administration. With the forced abdication of Emperor Wilhelm II and the resignation of Reich Chancellor Max von Baden, business was transferred to the Council of People's Representatives on 11 Nov. 1918, which temporarily exercised the function of an imperial government until the government of Philipp Scheidemann took office on 19 February 1919. From 9 November 1918 to 3 March 1919, the head of the Reich Chancellery was the journalist Curt Baake. After the Weimar parliamentary democracy was established, the position of the Reich Chancellor also changed, as did that of the Reich Chancellery. While the Imperial Chancellor was no longer the only Imperial Minister, as he was in the Empire, he, as Chairman of the Imperial Government, determined the political guidelines in accordance with Articles 55 and 56 of the Imperial Constitution, through which he was able to exert a decisive influence on the fate of the Empire. His authority to issue directives was, of course, restricted by constitutional law and political practice to a considerable extent, for it had to be brought into line politically with the powers of other organs provided for in the Reich Constitution. These were less the Reichsrat, which as a permanent conference of delegates of the state governments had only limited powers in the field of legislation and administration and whose significance cannot be compared with that of the Bundesrat of the Kaiserreich, than the other two constitutional organs: Reichstag and Reichspräsident. With the change of the position of the Reich Chancellor in the Weimar Republic, the tasks of the Reich Chancellery also increased. The Reich Chancellery remained, as in the imperial period, the office of the Reich Chancellor for his dealings with the constitutional organs, now the Reich President, the Reichstag, the Reich Council and the individual Reich Ministers. The State Secretary in the Reich Chancellery took part in the cabinet meetings, informed the Reich Chancellor about the current fundamental issues of politics as a whole, accompanied him at all important conferences in Germany and abroad, observed the formation of opinion in parliament, the press, coordinated legislative work with the Reich parties on his behalf, and gave a lecture to the Reich Chancellor himself. The Reich Chancellery was also represented by a member in the above-mentioned intergroup meetings, in which the most important decisions of the Cabinet were discussed in advance with the party and parliamentary group leaders. She made sure that, despite the constant tensions in the constantly changing coalitions, the objective work of the Reich's departments continued. he preparation of the collegiate decisions and the reliable monitoring of their implementation, two of the Reich Chancellery's main tasks, was of particular importance in this respect. The necessary consequence of these increased tasks was an increase in the number of departments in the Reich Chancellery from three (as of 1910) to eight (as of 1927) and in the number of civil servants from 20 before the outbreak of the First World War. Formally, the Reich Chancellery had various offices attached to it, which were either directly subordinated to it, such as the Reich Headquarters for Homeland Service, or under the direct control of the Reich Chancellor. When, after the death of the Reich President von Hindenburg, the Reich Chancellor took over the powers and rights of the head of state of the German Reich by the Law of August 1, 1934 - including the supreme command of the Wehrmacht - and thus united the office of Reich President with the office of Reich Chancellor in his person, this also had an effect on his relationship with the Reich government. As head of state, Hitler had the right to appoint and dismiss the Reich Ministers without having to wait for the proposal of the Reich Chancellor, as the Reich President had done. The Reichsminister were therefore completely dependent on him. According to the Reich Law of 16 October 1934 on the Oath of the Reich Ministers and Members of the State Governments, the formula of which was later also incorporated into the German Civil Servants Law of 26 January 1937, they were obliged to loyalty and obedience to him. The Führer principle of the NSDAP now also applied to the Reich government, whose members the "Führer und Reichskanzler," as Hitler was called after the decree to the Reich Minister of the Interior of August 2, 1934, only had to advise in inner-German dealings, but were now also legally obliged to submit to his will in case of a dissenting opinion. This meant that the Reichskabinett was no longer a decision-making body in which the Reich Chancellor could possibly have been majorized, but rather a "Führerrat", which only had to advise the head of government. It was planned to also fix this changed position of the Reich Chancellor vis-à-vis the Reich government in law, an intention which, at Hitler's request, was postponed in the cabinet meeting of 26 January 1937, particularly with regard to foreign countries, until the creation of a new Basic Law. The above-mentioned concentration of state tasks on the Führer and Reich Chancellor naturally also had an effect on the responsibilities of the Reich Chancellery. Thus, for example, the Enabling Act already brought about a certain increase in tasks for them, because the laws passed by the Reich government were no longer to be drawn up and promulgated by the Reich President, but by the Reich Chancellor, and the fewest laws were still passed in the ordinary legislative process, through the Reichstag, but went the second legislative process described above, or were passed as Führer decrees or ordinances - without the participation of the Cabinet. The strengthened position of the head of the Reich Chancellery was conspicuous externally in the fact that the documents of government laws signed by Hitler and co-signed by the participating Reich Minister now always also bore the co-signature of the Reich Minister and head of the Reich Chancellery, who thus assumed responsibility for the proper course of the legislative process. After the establishment of the Council of Ministers for the Defence of the Reich at the end of August 1939, the signature of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers for the Defence of the Reich was also necessary in second place behind that of Hitler. In addition, the head of the Reich Chancellery also signed all the Führer decrees with legislative content and, if necessary - which never occurred - the Reichstag laws and the laws enacted on the basis of the "Volksgesetzgebung" (People's Legislation). The increasing workload of Hitler, who in addition to the powers of the Reich Chancellor and the Reich President also exercised supreme command over the Wehrmacht, meant that the cabinet meetings gradually ceased. In addition, the Reich Chancellor, who could no longer be informed by the Reich Ministers united in the cabinet about the completion of individual tasks in the departments, was increasingly dependent on information from the head of the Reich Chancellery. The task of selecting from the wealth of information supplied and processed those suitable for presentation to the Reich Chancellor and of deciding whether Hitler's intervention in certain matters appeared necessary was therefore the responsibility of the head of the Reich Chancellery, who granted him another key position in the leadership apparatus of the state civilian sector. The Reichsminister also had the opportunity to give individual lectures directly to the Reich Chancellor. But Hitler also made less and less use of this, so that the head of the Reich Chancellery practically advised him alone, which strengthened his position vis-à-vis the specialist ministers, who tried in vain to reach certain agreements among themselves through private meetings, especially towards the end of the war. The office of the Reich President, renamed "Präsidialkanzlei" and renamed "Präsidialkanzlei des Führers und Reichskanzlers" by decree of the Führer and Reich Chancellor of 1 December 1937, remained responsible for the handling of all matters concerning the head of state even after the merger of the offices of the Reich President and the Reich Chancellor.B. the preparation of ceremonial receptions of foreign heads of state, princes and statesmen, the receipt of letters of attestation and recall from foreign diplomats, congratulations and condolences from the head of state, the processing of petitions in matters of grace and the entire title and religious order system. On the other hand, the political affairs in which, in addition to the decision of the Reich government, the decision of the head of the Reich was also necessary, were now taken care of by the Reich Chancellery, as was the preparation of political decisions, which up to then had to be made by the head of state, such as the enactment of organizational decrees, which were now the sole responsibility of the Reich Chancellery. Although the documents of appointment and dismissal for the higher Reich officials were still to be submitted to Hitler for execution by the office of the head of state, i.e. now by the head of the presidential chancellery, the responsible ministers and the Reich Chancellery were responsible for the factual and political preparation. Inventory description: Inventory history The day after the Reich Chancellery was established, on 19 May 1878, the expediting secretary in the Foreign Office, Hans Rudolf Sachse, who shortly afterwards began his service as a registrar in the new Reich authority, presented the draft of a registry order for the Reich Chancellery to the lecturing council of Tiedemann. His "basic features for the book and file keeping at the Reich Chancellery" were obviously based on the experience of the Foreign Office's records administration. The records were initially stored loosely in shelves in the registry, probably lying from the outset in the provided and already inscribed file covers. If a file unit had reached a thickness of 2 - 3 cm, it was provided with a linen back and another dust jacket and formed into a tape by means of thread stitching. This organisation of written records proved to be sufficient and practicable for a long series of years. With the gradual further development of the functions and activities of the Reich Chancellery, and as a result of the development of constitutional law and administrative organization in the Reich and in the federal states, however, it had to appear in need of change over time. At the turn of the century it was therefore decided to introduce a more differentiated file system, which came into force on 1 January 1900. The state's new beginning on 13 February 1919, the day on which Cabinet Scheidemann took office, brought a continuous cut in the registry of the Reich Chancellery. The entire file inventory was transferred to the old filing system and new files were created. The 30th of January meant a noticeable, but not sharp cut in the records administration of the Reich Chancellery. In order to start a new filing layer on this day, numerous files were removed from the current filing system, stapled and repositioned in the old filing system. They were replaced by new volumes. However, this only happened if the running band was filled to some extent anyway; if this was not the case, it was continued. In any case, the band counting began again with the number 1, although the series from the Weimar period continued seamlessly. The file structure, however, was left unchanged, and thread-stitching generally remained the same; standing files were used for the first time only for newly created series. In addition to the files kept in the registry, other records were also handed down by the fact that the Reich Chancellors and senior officials of the Reich Chancellery did not have handwritten records, personal papers, and a large part of their private correspondence filed in the registry, but as a rule kept them in their offices. It was not uncommon for such documents to be taken along when leaving office. Thus the estates of the Reich Chancellors Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Bülow, Hertling and Luther as well as of the chiefs of the Reich Chancellery Rottenburg and Pünder, which are kept in the Federal Archives, almost regularly contain official or semi-official documents in addition to private records, which have arisen from the exercise of official functions. The fact that the files of the Lammers Minister's Office have remained in the inventory is a consequence of their joint outsourcing with the inventory towards the end of the Second World War. In other cases, files of Reich Chancellors and senior officials with material on specific issues, with documents for conferences, meetings, etc., were handed over to the registry for safekeeping as soon as they were no longer needed and assigned to the relevant subject series as supplements. As a result, such hand files are scattered over the inventory, e.g. the hand files for the series "Execution of the Peace Treaty, Reparations" in the group "Foreign Affairs". The secret files of the Reich Chancellery formed another complex of documents separate from the registry holdings, the content, scope and structure of which unfortunately are not known in detail. According to the information available in the Federal Archives, they were probably burned before the end of the war by members of the Reich Chancellery in accordance with the decree of the Reich Minister of the Interior to the Reich Defence Commissioners of 12 October 1944 concerning "Behaviour of the Authorities in the Event of Enemy Occupation"[85] Individual fragments of secret files, which probably accidentally escaped annihilation and were in the inventory, were listed in the present find book at the end of the section "Files of the Minister's Office". In Potsdam, with a few exceptions, there are those old files of the Reich Chancellery from the period 1878 - 1919 which had been removed from the current registry in mid-February 1919 and deposited in an old file file. The Reichsarchiv had only been able to take it over in 1937 or 1938, after earlier efforts in vain. Only the old files of the service administration, including the personnel files, remained in the Authority. During the Second World War, the holdings of the Reich Archives, together with other archival materials, were moved to the Staßfurt salt mine near Magdeburg, where they fell into the hands of the Red Army in 1945. It was taken to the Soviet Union and 10 years later, in July 1955, handed over to the German Central Archive (renamed the "Central State Archive of the GDR" in 1973) in Potsdam. There it formed the inventory 07. 01. The inventory division into four departments was retained. In addition to the former Reichsarchiv holdings, the Central State Archives also kept about 800 individual records of the registry from the years 1933 - 1945, which were presumably found in the Wilhelmstraße office building. The majority of the Reichskanzleiakten from the years 1919 - 1945 as well as the old files of the office administration had been in Berlin only until the last phase of the war. As the situation in and around Berlin worsened, they were relocated to southern Germany, where they were confiscated by American troops in 1945. Via the Ministerial Collecting Center in Hessisch-Lichtenau and Fürstenhagen near Kassel, the central collection point for all material found by the Americans in their occupation zone[90], they reached the Berlin Documents Unit at the beginning of 1946. Here they - like other German files stored there - were evaluated for investigations against leading personalities from the state, the party and other areas of public life in preparation for war crimes trials. During the Berlin blockade in the summer of 1948, the files united in the Documents Unit were transferred to Whaddon Hall near Bletchley in the southern English county of Buckinghamshire. The files of the Reich Chancellery were stored there until 1958 and were provisionally arranged, recorded and selected for filming. In addition to the tradition of the Federal Foreign Office, which is primarily relevant, they also served as the basis for the edition of files on German foreign policy, which was initially edited exclusively by Anglo-Saxon and French historians. These files finally reached the Federal Archives in two transports in December 1958 and January 1959, a remainder at the end of April 1959. Here they form the listed holdings R 43 I, II. Archivische Bearbeitung During the provisional arrangement and indexing of the files of the Reich Chancellery from the years 1919 - 1945 in Whaddon Hall, the editors proceeded from two partial holdings. One of them essentially covered the tradition of the Weimar period, the other mainly the files from the period after 30 January 1933; they were briefly referred to as the "Old" and "New" Reich Chancelleries. As mentioned above, this division had already taken place in January/February 1933 in the Reich Chancellery and had been maintained during the relocation of the files during the war and after their confiscation. In the course of the processing, it was refrained from restoring the consistent arrangement of the file groups in both partial holdings, e.g. according to the alphabet of the group titles as they had existed in the registry of the Reich Chancellery. Only the registry connections within the groups that were presumably largely lost due to frequent relocations of the holdings were taken into account, whereby errors and mistakes were often made due to a lack of familiarity with the registry relationships and the file management of the Reich Chancellery. Nevertheless, it was possible to restore the mass of files to their original order with the help of the old signatures and tape numbers. Less satisfactorily, the classification of the not insignificant remnant of the tradition was resolved, which consisted of files of the minister's office, hand files of officials, secret file fragments, volumes with collections of circulars, circulars and press cuttings, registration aids, etc. Materials of this kind came to various places, especially at the end of both parts of the stock. In each part of the collection, the volumes were numbered consecutively. The distortion was also differentiated between the two partial stocks. The sequential number, the old signature and the runtime were included as formal specifications. In order to identify the contents of the file, the serial title was taken from the inscription of the file as the subject of the thread-stitched volumes, i.e. above all the files of the older part. In the case of standing folders, on the other hand, the titles of the individual transactions were entered in the list, as far as Rotuli was available with the corresponding information, and the subject series title was usually dispensed with. As a result, two very different lists were drawn up in terms of their degree of resolution. In the Federal Archives, these directories served for a long time as exclusive finding aids. This meant that the division into two parts, R 43 I (Old Reich Chancellery) and R 43 II (New Reich Chancellery), was retained. The consecutive numbering carried out in Waddon Hall also remained unchanged, since the files had already frequently been quoted in scientific publications afterwards. For conservation reasons, however, the documents stored in standing files and folders had to be transferred to archive folders; as a rule, two or three or sometimes more volumes were formed from the contents of one folder. This was necessary in order to separate files from various subject series that had been united in the Reich Chancellery and to form handy, not too extensive volumes. The volumes formed from the documents of a standing file, however, retained its serial number and were distinguished by the addition of letters (a, b, c, etc.). Within the volumes, the delimitation of the processes from each other, which had previously been recognizable by filing them in hanging binders, was marked by the insertion of separator sheets. On the other hand it turned out that 84 volumes from R 43 I and 205 volumes from R 43 II could not be separated and destroyed. The largest part (125 volumes) concerned the administration of the Aid Fund and the Disposition Fund of the Reich Chancellor; it consisted of individual files on the acceptance and use of donations from private sources, on the granting or refusal of support, other donations or gifts of honour to private individuals, associations and federations in emergencies, birthdays, anniversaries, events and on the occasion of the assumption of honorary sponsorships by the Reich Chancellor. The corresponding activity of the Reich Chancellery is already documented by several series in the groups "Reich Chancellor" and "Welfare" as well as by a number of files of the minister's office. The second largest group of documents collected (about 120 volumes) were files of the service administration. They mainly contained cash documents, invoices and receipts, company offers, correspondence with individual companies about deliveries and services for the Reich Chancellery as well as irrelevant documents about various house matters. The rest of the non-archival material consisted of volumes with multiple traditions and collections of official printed matter, in a few cases volumes containing only individual transmission letters. Finally, 44 volumes with documents of foreign provenances were removed from the holdings and assigned to other holdings, in some cases also to places outside the house. The majority of the documents are from the Community of Student Associations, which Reichsminister Dr. Lammers managed and whose business he had led through his office. Details are given in the Annex. The maps and plans, which were taken from the files for conservation reasons, were combined in the map archive to an independent group "Plan R 43 II". These are in particular planning breaks for the new building from the years 1943 ff. They are indexed by a separate index. The holdings of the Central State Archives (07.01) and the Federal Archives (R 43) were merged into holdings R 43 following the merger of the two archives in 1990. For the files of the Reich Chancellery from the years 1919 to 1945, a publication index was available since 1984, which also takes into account the files of this epoch kept in the Central State Archives until 1990. For the files of the "Old Reich Chancellery" (1878-1919), the Central State Archives had a finding aid book that had already been compiled in the Reich Archives. In addition to the files of the "old" Reich Chancellery from the years 1878 - 1918 described since January 2005 with an online find book (editor: Mr. Hollmann), those of the so-called "new" Reich Chancellery for the years 1919 - 1945 were also added in September 2006 (editor: Simone Walther). Because of the recording of the approx. 10,000 archive units in three different signature systems or partial inventories at that time, there were some database-technical peculiarities to consider. A re-signing of the microfilmed files for easier integration as closed holdings in the database of the Federal Archives was out of the question for various archival reasons. The units of description (files) identified with various text programs in the 1984 Publication Findbuch were imported into the database using a retroco-version procedure. Three so-called partial or secondary stocks were created, which differ from each other by their signature system. In the earlier distortion, the editors formed tape series or series that very often consisted of two or three of the "partial stocks". In the database, however, it is technically not possible to create such a tape or series across all stocks. The presentation of the series and volume series in the now available online finding aid required the relatively time-consuming "manual" merging of the various parts of a volume sequence in the cross-folder classification scheme (classification). In such a volume series, the volume sequence title appears repeatedly within the volume sequence before the volume or the volumes from another "partial stock". Since the creation of series, partly with additional subordinate volume sequences from different partial stocks, was just as impossible to implement, the corresponding information was partly recorded in supplementary classification points. As a rule, however, the structure handed down in the Publication Findbuch has been retained and the units of description have been classified according to their order. In the course of the processing, the signatures displayed incorrectly or incompletely in the printed finding aids could be corrected. A revision of the directory data according to the now valid archive rules did not seem to be necessary due to the very high effort involved. Minor corrections were made to the titles. Dates in titles that did not belong directly to the title were moved from there to the differentiated runtime field. Citation style: BArch, R 43/...