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German Documents in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2008

Gerhard L. Weinberg
Gerhard L. Weinberg
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina Emeritus
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Extract

At the end of World War II, vast quantities of German documents had fallen into the hands of the Allies either during hostilities or in the immediately following weeks. Something will be said near the end of this report about the archives captured or seized by the Soviet Union; the emphasis here will be on those that came into the possession of the Western Allies. The United States and Great Britain made agreements for joint control and exploitation, of which the most important was the Bissell-Sinclair agreement named for the intelligence chiefs who signed it. The German naval, foreign office, and chancellery archives were to be physically located in England, while the military, Nazi Party, and related files were to come to the United States. Each of the two countries was to be represented at the site of the other's holdings, have access to the files, and play a role in decisions about their fate. The bulk of those German records that came to the United States were deposited in a section of a World War I torpedo factory in Alexandria, Virginia, which had been made into the temporary holding center for the World War II records of the American army and American theater commands. In accordance with the admonition to turn swords into plowshares, the building is now an artists' boutique.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , December 2008 , pp. 555 - 567
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2008

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References

1 In 1959 the National Archives published a “Supplement to the Guide to Captured German Documents” that I had prepared for the Committee for the Study of War Documents of the AHA.

2 Armstrong, John A., ed., Soviet Partisans in World War II (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

3 The details about the history and fate of the archives are covered best by the collected papers in Robert, Wolfe, ed., Captured German and Related Records: A National Archives Conference (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974)Google Scholar. See also Eckert, Astrid M., Kampf um die Akten. Die Westalliierten und die Rückgabe von deutschem Archivgut nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004)Google Scholar; an English language edition is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Major files of the Committee for the Study of War Documents are in the Oron J. Hale Papers at the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia.

4 The records of the German Foreign Ministry held in England with an indication of which portions were filmed and by whom are covered for the years 1867 to 1920 by A Catalogue of Files and Microfilms of the German Foreign Ministry Archives 1867–1920 prepared under the direction of Howard M. Ehrmann and published by the Committee for the Study of War Documents of the AHA in 1959. The years 1920–1945 are covered by a four-volume set, George O. Kent, ed., A Catalogue of Files and Microfilms of the German Foreign Ministry Archives 1920–1945, published by the Hoover Institution in 1962–72. The records of the Reichskanzlei that were also in England were returned unfilmed, but substantial portions have been filmed by the Bundesarchiv.

5 The only exception to this in the Alexandria film is a small group of rolls taken over from the army in which numbered flashes had been inserted for help in locating items rather than frame numbers. It did not seem worth refilming the same documents with frame numbers when that risked not having funds to film other files that might then have to be omitted by the project.

6 My own connection with the project ended when I objected to the filming without date sheets or other finding aids of records of private firms included in the Nuremberg Industrialists (NI) series of documents held at the National Archives for return to the firms in Germany.

7 Lötzke, Helmut and Brather, Hans-Stephan, Übersicht über die Bestände des Deutschen Zentralarchivs Potsdam (Berlin-East: Rütten & Loening, 1957)Google Scholar. There is a helpful discussion of the situation before the vast holdings of the Moscow Special Archive became known in Kahlenberg, Friedrich P., Deutsche Archive in Ost und West. Zur Entwicklung des staatlichen Archivwesens seit 1945 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1972)Google Scholar.