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 cords of the three services down to 1918. The records of the First and Second Republics, however, are housed in the Archive of the Republic section of the State Archives, where the military component is administered by a single office. As far as I can judge, the rule is that records are passed to the State Archives but that the armed forces reserve their rights with regard to public access within the 30-year closure period. In most other respects the Ministry of Defence has no say in the policies and administration of the State Archives. In Austria, therefore, we see the complete integration of the military archive system into the State Archives, without causing any major problems for either party to this arrangement. This may also reflect the fact that the armed forces in Austria are relatively small, hardly play a part in public life or perceptions, and that matters are simply more manageable in terms of size, which is also the case in Switzerland. Let us now take a brief look at the situation in the United States of America and in the United Kingdom. In the USA the military archival records belong by law within the responsibility of the US National Archives. The Defence Department and the armed services are obliged to transfer all non-current records to the National Archives. However, some records are first passed to the historical branches of the various services where they remain until historical research and military evaluation have been completed on them. There are various Military Branches in the National Archives, but only civilian archivists are employed there. The Defence Department only has a measure of control over those records which have been deposited in the National Archives where classified status applies. This regulation has been in place since the creation of the National Archives, and causes no problems for either the Archives or the Defence Department. In the United Kingdom we find a situation similar to that in the United States. Here also, certain non-current records are initially passed to the historical branches of the armed services and are transferred from there to the Public Record Office. The exceptions to this are official film and photographs, which are transferred to the Imperial War Museum as a Public Record Office-approved place of deposit for these materials. Military private papers are also not held in the PRO, and those which do reach a public institution are donated either to the archives of appropriate educational institutions (schools, colleges, universities) or to research collections such as those of the Imperial War Museum. The military records in the United Kingdom are, therefore, relatively fragmented when compared to the situation in the rest of Europe. I must therefore remind you that the Public Record Office sees itself as a purely state archive which is only responsible for the records illustrating the activities of the state administration. The general European archival tradition of gathering non-official records to supplement the state records in order to present the researcher 125