Gestapo personal files from the Düsseldorf control center
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The files of the state police control center in Düsseldorf were created and kept by the employees there from 1933 to 1944. They served the purpose of collecting incriminating material and evidence about politically opposition members, "traitors", Roma , "anti-social" , homosexuals and other suspicious persons who were in the control center's area of responsibility. The Gestapo originally referred to the documents as "personnel files". In order to avoid misunderstandings with the documents of the same name from the field of human resource management, the source material is generally referred to as "personal files" or "personal files". With approx. 72,000 files, the inventory represents the largest preserved archive of the Gestapo and is today handed over to the State Archive of North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland Department , the former Main State Archive of Düsseldorf.
history
The State Police Headquarters in Düsseldorf was the second largest Gestapo office in the National Socialist German Reich after the State Police Headquarters in Berlin . In 1941 alone, approximately 4.15 million people were subject to the 349 employees of the agency. After an air raid in the summer of 1943, the Gestapo office building on Prinz-Georg-Strasse in Düsseldorf was badly damaged. A decimation of the files is conceivable in view of the external circumstances, but cannot be proven with certainty. The control center was then to be relocated to neighboring Ratingen and the Gestapo files were to be relocated. In October 1944, a large part of the stock was transported to a factory building in Löhne . In an action lasting several days, many files were probably burned before the remainder were initially briefly transferred to Wuppertal in early 1945 and then to the barracks of the Wewelsburg-Niederhagen concentration camp . There, the entire inventory was confiscated by the US armed forces at the end of the Second World War .
The US occupation authorities ordered the find and used it in the post-war period primarily for legal purposes to clarify questions of guilt and reparation cases. According to the British military government, which took over the Gestapo files from the USA , an unspecified part of the inventory had been destroyed since the confiscation. Negotiations began in 1950 about the whereabouts of the files, which ended after a year and a half in favor of the Federal Republic . The British Land Commissioner's Office handed the holdings over to the Main State Archives in Düsseldorf in April 1952 . The stock has been expanded over the years. In 2001 the State Archives received Gestapo personal files on mainly Dutch nationals from the Amsterdam Rijksinstitut Voor Oorlogsdocumentatie ( Dutch Institute for War Documentation ). The documents were handed over to the Netherlands by the Allied occupation powers in 1955. In 2009 the Federal Archives handed over some personal Gestapo files from the old holdings of various institutions to the State Archive of North Rhine-Westphalia. These included the Ministry for State Security , the Central Party Control Commission and the German Central Archives in Potsdam . How the GDR institutions mentioned came into possession of the documents has not yet been reconstructed.
Duration
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The inventory has been fully cataloged and includes around 72,000 personal files from the Gestapo control center in Düsseldorf with the branches in Duisburg, Essen, Mönchengladbach, Krefeld, Oberhausen, Wuppertal and the border commissions in Emmerich, Kaldenkirchen and Kleve. The original inventory was even larger in 1944, but was decimated by the effects of the war and the deliberate destruction of files. The term covers the years from 1926 to 1944, which is due to the adoption of police files of certain groups of people (foreign legionaries, separatists and communists ) from the time of the Weimar Republic . The inventory regulations, which are still valid today, were drawn up by the US military government and then adopted by the British military government and the Düsseldorf State Archives. The files are numbered consecutively and listed on index cards in alphabetical order. Contrary to archival principles, the origins were mixed up during the indexing process , but this was not corrected in view of the large volume of files. In addition, these regulations made it easier to research the personal files.
An instruction from the Secret State Police Office stipulated that individual files should be kept in a person-related manner, but this was not always observed in practice. Collective files have been handed down in which cases involving several people are recorded, although the offense should have been filed in the files of all those involved. The actual personal file consisted of a main file, possibly also a subsidiary file from a Gestapo field service.
File structure
The structure of a file always follows the same pattern. A personnel sheet acts as a cover sheet, which contains all relevant data and identification features for the person recorded. In addition to the address, the practiced occupation, the education and the political career, the personal details of the parents and their current whereabouts were also recorded. Furthermore, the form 17 contains information that should enable a precise physical description of the person concerned. In addition to optically dominant features such as eye and hair color, special aspects such as posture or gait are noted with several specifications. The walk alone offered the following options: “dragging, lively, swaying, light, graceful, calm and leisurely, limping, conspicuous, large or small steps, stiff-legged”. Applicable things had to be underlined or noted next to the individual category. At the end of the arch there was space for three photographs the size of a passport photo , the date of which and the photographer also had to be specified. As a rule, this was followed by a justification for the creation of the file. For the most part, the persons recorded had become politically suspicious, which could mean both active communist activity and a naive expression against the Nazi regime, for example in the form of an insult to the SA . Subsequently, the file contained written information about the person. Reports, interrogation protocols, testimony and official correspondence dominate here. But also forms, individual documents and newspaper forms can be found. Every little thing was collected that even remotely “proved” the person's crime. Often the files end with the person in question being sent to a concentration camp . The significant importance of the preserved inventory, whose extensive size is considered unique, is manifold. In the immediate post-war period, it served the occupying powers as a source of information, especially for trials about National Socialist perpetrators and politically motivated injustice. Building on this, the files were used in a legal context until the 1960s to clarify contemporary reparation cases. But the surviving holdings also represent a valuable collection of sources in historical terms. In addition to important information on Nazi history, the files also provide information on the history of the resistance that grew stronger at the end of the National Socialist dictatorship in the greater Düsseldorf area ( Aktion Rheinland , Edelweißpiraten ). Important clues about the structural development of organizations or the mood of the population can also be found.
insight into files
In order to use the archive material, an application for special permission must be sent to the State Archive of North Rhine-Westphalia , because many of the files still contain sensitive personal data and are therefore blocked in accordance with Section 7 of the North Rhine-Westphalia Archives Act . Files on persons who can be shown to have died for at least 10 years or who were born over 100 years ago are freely accessible. Files can also be released for inspection for scientific use upon request. The research is carried out using a person index, which was rewritten in a tape repertory and arranged alphabetically, or a crime-related key word index, which was subsequently created in the 1960s by the employees of the then Central State Archives in Düsseldorf. The name, date of birth, place of birth of the person and the file number are noted on the index cards.
The files are available in their entirety as digital copies and are only released as originals if absolutely necessary.
literature
Holdings and finding aids
- The holdings of the North Rhine-Westphalian Main State Archives , brief overview. 3rd revised and expanded edition. Self-published by Nordrh.-Westf. Main State Archives, Düsseldorf 1994.
- Finding aid in the Landesarchiv Düsseldorf: RW 58 ; Finding aids 411.03.1-30, 7 card files.
Secondary literature
- The documents of the NSDAP, its branches and affiliated associations in the tradition of state authorities in the area of today's state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Part 1-3. Introduced by Peter Dohms and Klaus Wisotzky, edited by Klaus Wisotzky. Self-published by Nordrh.-Westf. Main State Archives, Düsseldorf 1981.
- The documents of the NSDAP, its branches and affiliated associations in the tradition of state authorities in the area of today's state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Part 4 . Edited by Annelie Buntenbach and Hans Georg Radel. Self-published by Nordrh.-Westf. State Archives, Detmold 1983.
- Peter Dohms: Pamphlets in Gestapo files. Proof and analysis of the pamphlets in the Gestapo files in the main state archive in Düsseldorf. With a literature report and an overview of the sources on resistance and persecution in the Rhine-Ruhr area 1933–1945 . Published by the main state archive in Düsseldorf. Respublica-Verlag, Siegburg 1977.
- Julia Lederle: Gestapo personal files , in: Unknown sources: “Mass files” of the 20th century. Investigations of serial documents from standardized administrative procedures , vol. 2. Edited by Jens Heckl, Düsseldorf 2012.
- Jan Ruckenbiel: Social Control in the Nazi Regime. Protest, denunciation and persecution. On the practice of everyday oppression in the interplay between the population and the Gestapo . Cologne 2003.
- Gisela Vollmer: The holdings of the Gestapo control center in Düsseldorf in the main state archive in Düsseldorf. For indexing personal files . In: The archivist. Bulletin for German Archives 2/1963, pp. 287–294.