ARHIVSKI VJESNIK 42. (ZAGREB, 1999.)

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M. Kehrig, The position of military archives in the frame of archival service Independence or integration?, Arh. vjesn., god. 42 (1999), str. 113-128 in 1920. Its first President was retired Major General Merz von Quirnheim, a former officer in the Royal Bavarian Army, and his successor in the 1920s was the former Royal Prussian Army Major General Hans von Haeften. Incidentally, the sons of both Presidents were shot on the night of the 20/21 July 1944 in the courtyard of the Armed Forces High Command headquarters in Berlin, in the wake of the failed 'July plot' against Hitler and the National Socialist regime. The core of the Imperial Archive was formed of the four war archives of the kingdoms in Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Stuttgart and Potsdam. The Imperial Archives was based in the former Prussian Officers School on the Brauhausberg in Potsdam, and its personnel was composed of retired Staff and General Staff officers (70%) and professional historians, with very few professional archivists (30%). These latter, in particular, were of course concerned to see the fledgling Imperial Archive evolve into a proper Imperial Archive housing the records of all government departments. They came into conflict with the Imperial Armed Forces in 1936, following the re-establishment of military sovereignty in the German Empire and the removal of the army records from the Imperial Archives which were then united under the 'Chief of the Army Archives', who was in turn subordinate to a Chief Quartermaster in the Army General Staff. The newly created Air Force placed its records in the Military Scientific Department of the Air Force (Archives), and the Naval Archive, which had already been created in 1916 outside the Admiralty Staff, was now redesignated as the Military Scientific Department of the Navy (Archives). In the Army, research was already separated out in the shape of the Army Historical Research Establishment. In 1940 the War Archive of the Armed Forces High Command was created under Major General Scherff, the 'Representative of the Führer for the military historiography of the Second World War', and in the same year the War Archive of the Waffen-SS was set up in Zasmuki Castle in Bohemia. At the end of the war the Air Force destroyed all of its archive material, the Navy on the other hand was able to move its own archived records out of Berlin to Tambach Castle near Coburg, did not destroy one single piece of paper, and even provided some of its personnel to accompany these records to London when the British forces took possession of them. The Army suffered a terrible loss when the Army Archive on the Brauhausberg in Potsdam was completely destroyed during a heavy multiple air raid by the Allies in April 1945. A proportion of the older records which had been moved to southern Germany was then destroyed by German soldiers. The War Archive of the Waffen-SS was confiscated by the Czechs, and remains in Czech hands to this day, on the grounds that the records are war-booty. I should like to mention here that the Czech position is unique among the NATO partners. In 1950 the 'Blank Office' was set up in the Federal Chancellor's (Konrad Adenauer's) Office, which was to concern itself with a West German defence contri122