State archive warehouse Göttingen
The Göttingen State Archive Camp was a collection point in Göttingen from 1953 to 1978 for several archives from East and Central Germany .
history
As a result of the advance of the Red Army on the German eastern territories, the German authorities arranged for important archive materials to be relocated from the east to a mine near Helmstedt in 1944 and 1945 . After Germany surrendered, these stocks were confiscated by the British occupying forces. The State Archive Warehouse was therefore created on November 16, 1953, when the East and Central German archives, which had been relocated to the West during the Second World War , were handed over to the State of Lower Saxony by the British occupation authorities after they had previously been collected in Goslar . In 1978 the archive warehouse was closed and the holdings incorporated into the Secret State Archive of Prussian Cultural Heritage in Berlin-Dahlem .
Stocks
A large part of the holdings of the State Archive Camp, more than 75 percent according to the long-time archive manager Kurt Forstreuter , came from the State Archive in Königsberg . This part of the inventory was kept on 1500 running meters of shelving and in twelve card cabinets. The materials from Königsberg became the property of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in 1957 , but the administration of this continued to be the responsibility of the archive warehouse in Göttingen.
The managed holdings from Königsberg are structured as follows:
| 1. Order archive | 2. Ducal archive | 3. New archive holdings | 4. Collections and deposits |
|---|---|---|---|
| a) Certificates | a) Ducal letters | a) Collections | |
| b) Order letters | b) East Prussian folios | b) Deposit | |
| c) Order folios | c) Budget Ministry | c) Discounts |
The order's holdings of documents comprised around 6,300 parchments. These were divided into 1. Internal Affairs, 2. External Relations, 3. Papal Deeds, 4. Livonian Matters, 5. Deeds of the Kulm Diocese and 6. The Order Letters Department contained around 30,000 letters, invoices, minutes of negotiations and memos from the years 1198 to 1525, these were arranged chronologically. The third part of the order archive, the order folios, contained 1. Letters and acts, 2. Spiritual statutes, 3. Copiaria of the order's privileges, 4. Court books, town books etc., 5. Manual books, 6. Appointments of offices, inventories, registers and visitations , 7/8. Finances, 9th Army, 10th Miscelle volumes, 11th Formula books, 12th anthologies of transcripts and 13th Deutschordensballei Bohemia.
In the ducal archives, about 100,000 letters were stored in section a), which were broken down geographically. Department b) structured its folios according to the following pattern: 1. Foreign relations, 2. Estate matters, 3. Chamber matters, 4. Church matters, 5. State regulations, 6. Individual towns and villages, 7. Chancellery, 8. Rescript books, 9. Vassal tables , 10. Tax assessment, 11. Special budgets of the domain offices, 12. Various. Department c) managed 3,000 packages of files from the period 1525 to 1804.
In the new archive holdings, all files of the authorities from the 18th to the 20th century were arranged; they comprised 1,200 packages. The collections in section 4. a) included files and individual items from famous noble families such as Dönhoff or Dohna (noble family) . The deposits consisted of remnants of some guilds and cities. The bequests included the genealogical collections Gallandi and Moeller, the Zimmermann card index of West Prussian Mennonite clans and the estate of August Winnig .
Furthermore, extensive parts of the city archives from Reval and Prenzlau as well as the state archives of Mecklenburg , Anhalt and Niederlausitz were stored in Göttingen. From these archives only the most valuable holdings, for example the oldest documents, exchanges of princes' letters, foreign correspondence and civil registers , were transferred to Lower Saxony.
literature
- Kruppe, Michael: The state archive warehouse in Göttingen (1953-1979): its history, its meaning . In: Prussia. New episode. Yearbook of the Historical Commission for East and West Prussian State Research and the Copernicus Association for the History and Regional Studies of West Prussia as well as communications from the Secret State Archive of Prussian Cultural Heritage , Vol. 6 (2015), pp. 126–162.
- Kurt Forstreuter : The state archive warehouse in Göttingen . In: Journal for East Research . Volume 3, 1954, pp. 92-94.
- State archive warehouse in Göttingen . In: Minerva handbooks Archives: Archives in the German-speaking area , Berlin 1974, pp. 334–339.
