German: Bundesarchiv | |
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![]() The Federal Archives in Koblenz | |
Archive overview | |
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Formed | 2 March 1952 |
Status | Active |
Headquarters | Potsdamer Straße 1 56075 Koblenz 50°20′32.712″N7°34′21.216″E / 50.34242000°N 7.57256000°E |
Annual budget | €54.6 million (as of 2009 [update] ) [1] |
Archive executives |
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Parent department | Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media |
Website | www |
Map | |
Location on a map of Rhineland-Palatinate |
The German Federal Archives or Bundesarchiv (BArch) (German : Bundesarchiv, lit. "Union-archive") are the National Archives of Germany. They were established at the current location in Koblenz in 1952.
They are subordinated to the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media (Claudia Roth since 2021) under the German Chancellery, [2] and before 1998, to the Federal Ministry of the Interior. [1]
On 6 December 2008, the Archives donated 100,000 photos to the public, by making them accessible via Wikimedia Commons. [3]
The federal archive for institutions and authorities in Germany, the first precursor to the present-day Federal Archives, was established in Potsdam, Brandenburg in 1919, a later date than in other European countries. This national archive documented German government dating from the founding of the North German Confederation in 1867. It also included material from the older German Confederation and the Imperial Chamber Court. The oldest documents in this collection dated back to the year 1411. Photographs and film of a younger vintage were also contained in the original archive, much of which was contributed by non-governmental sources. Despite efforts to save the most valuable parts of the collection, almost half of the archive's total contents were destroyed during World War II.The most valuable part of the civilian archive was saved by relocating them, but the military part of the archives were almost completely destroyed.
In 1946, the German Central Archive was founded in Potsdam, then in the Soviet occupation zone and later in East Germany. This archive, renamed the Central State Archive in 1973, was viewed as the successor to the original archive, in part because it was located in the same city. By the end of the 1950s, records that had originally been seized by the government of the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II had been returned to the archive.
In West Germany, the Cabinet of Germany decided to create a new Federal Archive in Koblenz in 1950, a project that was realized in 1952. The United States and the United Kingdom, like the Soviet Union, also seized records from Germany following World War II in their respective zones of occupation. In 1955, a Military Archives Division was established as part of the Federal Archives as a place into which these records were returned. In 1988, the Federal Archives Act elevated the tasks of the Federal Archive into law, and granted it rights to the documents produced by West Germany's courts, public authorities, and constitutional institutions.
The reunification of Germany in 1990 also led to the unification of West Germany's Federal Archive with East Germany's Central State Archive. In the course of this development, the formerly separate National Film Archive and Military Archives of East Germany were also merged into the Federal Archives.
With the unification of the two German archives in 1990, the traditions of the East Germany state authorities were absorbed into the Federal Archives. However, legal problems were encountered during this process in securing the archives and libraries of East Germany's political parties and mass organizations. Even though East Germany's political structure meant that these institutions had very close ties to the government, they were not public institutions. Further problems arose as these records were separated from other East German documents, resulting in the Federal Archives presenting an incomplete picture of East Germany's history. In 1991, an initiative was implemented that placed the records in question into the possession of the Federal Archives. As a result of this initiative, a bill amending the Federal Archives Act of 1988 that established the department foundation provided for the Federal Archives came into force on 13 March 1992.
The collection of the German Federal Archives today includes older documents from Germany's imperial past, Nazi Germany, [4] civilian and military records from East Germany (including East German political parties and mass organizations), and the documents inherited from West Germany's Federal Archive. In addition to state records, the Archives also contain material from political parties, associations, and societies of national prominence as well as historical collections. Besides the text documents, the Archives also keeps photographs, films, maps, posters, and electronic data in its collection.
Karl Wolf Biermann is a German singer-songwriter, poet, and former East German dissident. He is perhaps best known for the 1968 song "Ermutigung" and his expatriation from East Germany in 1976.
Argus Motoren was a German manufacturing firm known for their series of small inverted-V engines and the Argus As 014 pulsejet for the V-1 flying bomb.
The Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt) was a German government agency based in Berlin which maintained records of members of the former German Wehrmacht who were killed in action, as well as official military records of all military personnel during World War II as well as naval military records since 1871 and other war-related records. Formerly called the Wehrmachtsauskunftstelle für Kriegerverluste und Kriegsgefangene (WASt), the agency also provided information about the fate of foreign and German soldiers as well as prisoners of war in Germany. Such information is used for civil proceedings, for an official register of war graves, for historical research and as biographical and genealogical purposes.
The Cross of Honour of the German Mother, referred to colloquially as the Mutterehrenkreuz or simply Mutterkreuz, was a state decoration conferred by the government of the German Reich to honour a Reichsdeutsche German mother for exceptional merit to the German nation. Eligibility later extended to include Volksdeutsche mothers from, for example, Austria and Sudetenland, that had earlier been incorporated into the German Reich.
Demographic estimates of the flight and expulsion of Germans have been derived by either the compilation of registered dead and missing persons or by a comparison of pre-war and post-war population data. Estimates of the number of displaced Germans vary in the range of 12.0–16.5 million. The death toll attributable to the flight and expulsions was estimated at 2.2 million by the West German government in 1958 using the population balance method. German records which became public in 1987 have caused some historians in Germany to put the actual total at about 500,000 based on the listing of confirmed deaths. The German Historical Museum puts the figure at 600,000 victims and says that the official figure of 2 million did not stand up to later review. However, the German Red Cross still maintains that the total death toll of the expulsions is 2,251,500 persons.
The Berlin Document Center (BDC) was created in Berlin, Germany, after the end of World War II. Its task was to centralize the collection of documents from the time of Nazism, which were needed for the preparation of the Nuremberg Trials against war criminals. The BDC was under American administration until 1994, when the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) was allowed to take control of the BDC. While the paper records remained in Germany, the entire collection was microfilmed and made available at the National Archives in Washington, DC, where researchers have much better access unhindered by restrictive German privacy laws now in effect in Berlin.
The Stasi Records Agency was the organisation that administered the archives of Ministry of State Security (Stasi) of the former German Democratic Republic. It was a government agency of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was established when the Stasi Records Act came into force on 29 December 1991. Formally it was called the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic ; the official German abbreviation was BStU. On June 17, 2021, the BStU was absorbed into the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv).
The German Colonial Society (DKG) was a German organisation formed on 19 December 1887 to promote German colonialism. The Society was formed through the merger of the German Colonial Association and the Society for German Colonization. The Society was headquartered in Berlin.
Approximately three million German prisoners of war were captured by the Soviet Union during World War II, most of them during the great advances of the Red Army in the last year of the war. The POWs were employed as forced labor in the Soviet wartime economy and post-war reconstruction. By 1950 almost all surviving POWs had been released, with the last prisoner returning from the USSR in 1956. According to Soviet records 381,067 German Wehrmacht POWs died in NKVD camps. A commission set up by the West German government found that 3,060,000 German military personnel were taken prisoner by the USSR and that 1,094,250 died in captivity. According to German historian Rüdiger Overmans ca. 3,000,000 POWs were taken by the USSR; he put the "maximum" number of German POW deaths in Soviet hands at 1.0 million. Based on his research, Overmans believes that the deaths of 363,000 POWs in Soviet captivity can be confirmed by the files of Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt), and additionally maintains that "It seems entirely plausible, while not provable, that 700,000 German military personnel listed as missing actually died in Soviet custody."
Statistics for German World War II military casualties are divergent. The wartime military casualty figures compiled by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht through January 31, 1945 are often cited by military historians in accounts of individual campaigns in the war. A study by German historian Rüdiger Overmans concluded that total German military deaths were much higher than those originally reported by the German High Command, amounting to 5.3 million, including 900,000 men conscripted from outside Germany's 1937 borders, in Austria and in east-central Europe. The German government reported that its records list 4.3 million dead and missing military personnel.
Josef "Sepp" Janko was a Volksgruppenführer of the Danube Swabian German Cultural Association in Yugoslavia in 1939, and later was appointed SS Obersturmführer during World War II.
The Bundeswehr Technical and Airworthiness Center for Aircraft or is one of several testing centres of the German Armed Forces. Its tasks are the testing and evaluating of military aircraft and aerial weapon systems. The centre is also responsible for certifications and inspections of modifications made on aircraft already in service with the German Armed Forces. The Bundeswehr Technical and Airworthiness Center for Aircraft is not integrated into the command structure of the military branches of the German Armed Forces but is a branch of Federal Office of Bundeswehr Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support which is directly subordinate to the Federal Ministry of Defence. Founded in 1957, the centre is based at Manching Air Base. The unit has a strength of about 650 personnel, 50 of which are members of the armed forces, the rest are civilian.
The Bundeswehr Museum of German Defense Technology also known as Wehrtechnisches Museum Koblenz and Wehrtechnische Studiensammlung Koblenz (WTS-Koblenz) is the official Bundeswehr's Defense Technology Study Collection in Koblenz. It is one of Germany's important technical military exhibitions, with about 30,000 objects on an exhibition area of around 7,000 square metres (75,000 sq ft). It is known as one of the most extensive collections of its kind internationally. The main focus of the museum is on defense technology and the military science library. It is a subsidiary of the Federal Office of Bundeswehr Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support.
The Reich Debt Administration was the entity responsible for managing German state debt from 1900-1946.
The German Federal Archives has provided online encyclopedia Wikipedia with 100,000 historical images for free public access. The donation was the largest ever to the Wiki Commons media page. The images were made available to the Wikimedia Commons page, a database of over three million freely usable media files, from Thursday, Dec. 4. The donated pictures cover periods such as the Weimar Republic, the German colonial era, the Third Reich and Germany after reunification. It was the largest donation of media to the Commons page since it was set up in September 2004.
Nach dem Inkrafttreten des "Staatsvertrags über den Übergang der Aufgaben der Deutschen Dienststelle für die Benachrichtigung der nächsten Angehörigen von Gefallenen der ehemaligen deutschen Wehrmacht (WASt)" ist die Deutsche Dienststelle zum 1. Januar 2019 in das Bundesarchiv überführt worden. Zu diesem Zweck wurde im Bundesarchiv eine eigene Abteilung am Standort Eichborndamm in Berlin-Reinickendorf eingerichtet.[After the entry into force of the "State Treaty on the Transfer of Tasks to the Deutsche Dienststelle for Notification of the Next of Relatives of Fallen of the Former German Armed Forces (WASt)", the Deutsche Dienststelle was transferred to the Federal Archives on 1 January 2019. For this purpose, a separate department was set up in the Federal Archives at the Eichborndamm site in Berlin-Reinickendorf.]
Media related to Bundesarchiv at Wikimedia Commons