Erich Randt

Erich Randt (born May 17, 1887 in Neu Paleschken , West Prussia , † May 6, 1948 in Berlin ) was a German archivist and historian.

Professional background

After studying history, philology and law at the Universities of Wroclaw and the University of Königsberg , Randt completed the preparatory service for the archive service from 1912 to 1914 and began his archival work in 1914 at the Wroclaw State Archives. At the beginning of the First World War he took up military service and was taken prisoner by the British in 1916. After his release from three years of imprisonment, he went to the Secret State Archives in Berlin at the beginning of 1920 and again to the Wroclaw State Archives in the same year . In 1930 Randt took over the management of the State Archives in Stettin , from where he again moved to Wroclaw in 1935 as Director of the State Archives.

During World War II he headed from 1939 to 1944 as director of the State Archives, the archives in the General Government in Krakow , where he zugutekam that he spoke fluent Polish. In 1944 Randt went again to the Prussian Secret State Archives in Berlin-Dahlem, which he headed as the (last) director and where he was appointed Deputy General Director of the State Archives in April 1945.

After the end of the war he was released from the archives service in June 1945 and obliged to work as a construction worker. In April 1947 he was appointed representative of the Polish military mission in Berlin for archival issues in the East and worked closely with the director of the Polish central archive of historical files as part of his restitution mission.

Scientific activity

Randt received his doctorate summa cum laude in 1912 at the University of Königsberg with a thesis on the Mennonites in East Prussia and Lithuania. As director of the Szczecin State Archives, he was chairman of the Society for Pomeranian History and Archeology and a member of the board of the Historical Commission for Pomerania . As early as 1930 he was made an honorary member of the Association for the History of Silesia and after resuming his activities in 1935 in Wroclaw, he became chairman and editor of this association. He was also the second chairman of the Historical Commission for Silesia , head of the archives advisory center for all of Silesia and head of the Silesian regional office for post-war research. In 1938 his work "The older civil status registers of Silesia" was published by the Association for the History of Silesia, which is still considered the standard work on the then stock of church records in Silesia. He took an active part in research on the East . His work as head of archives in occupied Poland is viewed critically in some cases, as archiving principles (principle of provenance) were disregarded for political reasons. In February 1947, however, the Polish Military Mission in Berlin certified that he was guided by factual rather than political and police aspects in his official activities as head of the archive administration in the Generalgouvernement. As part of the tasks he was then given to deal with archival issues in the East, he provided the Polish archivists with considerable help in searching for the archived material.

Fonts

• The Mennonites in East Prussia. Dissertation, Königsberg 1912.
• New sources on the knowledge of the national origins of the Upper Silesian nobility. In: From Upper Silesia past and present. Book 1, Gleiwitz 1922, pp. 1-23.
• Regesta on Silesian history. Part 6: 1338-1342. In: Codex diplomaticus Silesiae . Volume 30, 1930.
• Border relations between the Silesian Piasts Duke Heinrich I and Duke Heinrich II with Duke Barnim I of Pomerania-Stettin and the Diocese of Kammin. In: Journal of the Association for the History of Silesia. No. 65, 1931, pp. 183-204.
• The more recent Polish historical research on the political relations between West Pomerania and Poland in the age of Emperor Otto the Great. Gdansk 1932.
• Border issues in the east. In: Annual reports for German history . No. 8, 1932, pp. 564-575.
• Karl Robert Klempin . In: Adolf Hofmeister , Erich Randt and Martin Wehrmann (ed.): Pommersche Lebensbilder . Volume I, Stettin 1934, pp. 176-189.
• The older civil status registers of Silesia. Görlitz 1938.
• Annual report for 1935 and 1936. In: Journal of the Association for the History of Silesia. No. 71, 1938, pp. 410-419.
• In memory of Duke Heinrich I of Silesia. In: Schlesische Heimat. No. 3, 1938, pp. 91-96.
• Political history of Silesia up to the year 1327. In: Hermann Aubin (Hrsg.): Geschichte Schlesiens. Breslau 1938, pp. 63–153.
• Annual report for 1937 and 1938. In: Journal of the Association for the History of Silesia. No. 72, 1939, pp. 359-367.
• The organization of archive maintenance in Silesia and the experiences made so far. In: Archival Journal . No. 45, 1939, pp. 187-201.
• Silesian archive maintenance 1935-1939. In: Silesian history sheets. 1939, pp. 73-86.
• Establishment of the German archive administration in the Generalgouvernement. In: Bulletin of the Prussian Archive Administration. No. 6, 1941, pp. 125-139.
• The Archives of the General Government. In: The castle. Quarterly publication of the Institute for German Ostarbeit. No. 1, 1941, pp. 25-55; ibid. No. 2, 1941, pp. 51-91.
• Archival sources on the history of Germanness in the Generalgouvernement. In: German struggle in the east. Literature and document inspection in the Generalgouvernement. Krakow 1941, pp. 12-17.
• Establishment of the contemporary history collections in the state archives. In: Bulletin of the Prussian Archive Administration. No. 7, 1942, pp. 159-163.
• Review of the previous work of the German archive administration in the Generalgouvernement. In: Bulletin of the Prussian Archive Administration. Volume 8, No. 11, 1943, pp. 165-174.

literature

• Adolf Diestelkamp : Erich Randt in memory, obituary. In: The archivist . Issue 2 1949, Col. 82-88.
• Karl G. Bruchmann : Erich Randt (1887-1948), obituary. In: Journal for East Research . 6th year 1957, issue 3, pp. 403–411.
• Wolfgang Leesch : The German archivists 1500–1945. Volume 2: Biographical Lexicon. Saur, Munich a. a. 1992, ISBN 3-598-10605-X , p. 473.
• Stefan Lehr: An almost forgotten Eastern insert. German archivists in the Generalgouvernement and in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (Schriften des Bundesarchivs, Vol. 68) , Düsseldorf 2007, ISBN 978-3-7700-1624-2 .
• 200 lat Archiwum Państwowego we Wrocławiu (200 years of the State Archives in Breslau / Wrocław). Wrocław 2012.
• Ernst Klee : The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 .