Report: German Studies Association 2002 Session Nr. 75, The Fight for
the Files: Captured German Records after World War II

Co-Sponsored by the German Historical Institute, Washington, D. C., and
the German Historical Institute, Paris

Moderator:  Christof Mauch, German Historical Institute, Washington, D.
C.

"Akten als Element der Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung: Das Schicksal
deutscher Akten nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg in Frankreich"
Stefan Martens, German Historical Institute, Paris

"'We should profoundly deplore the loss to historical truth': British
Perspectives on the Return of Captured German Records"
Astrid M. Eckert, Free University Berlin/German Historical Institute,
Washington, D. C.

"Of Confrontation and Cooperation: The German-German Conflict over the
Use of Eastbloc Nazi Files as Documentary Evidence in the Criminal
Investigations against the Nazi Perpetrators"
Annette Weinke, University of Potsdam

Commentator:  Gerhard L. Weinberg, University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill


The panel explored three different aspects of the postwar history of
captured German records, transforming archival records from sources for
the writing of history into objects of study with a history in their own
right.  Focusing on the "biographies" of the archives showed them to be
a highly contested commodity in the struggle for political, military,
and technical intelligence and in the search for precedents in the
writing of history.

When Allied troops advanced into Germany, they captured tons upon tons
of German records.  The historical records of the German Foreign Office
dating back to 1867 were seized by American and British troops in April
1945.  American GIs also captured about ten million Nazi Party
membership cards that would later become part of the Berlin Document
Center.  The papers of the German Navy fell into British hands, while
the Americans shipped countless German military records back to the
United States.  The Americans and British were relatively well prepared
for the capture of essential records at the war's close.  The French,
however, lacked the necessary background information to score a major
success, and the extent and character of records and archives captured
by Soviet troops remained unknown to the Western Allies in the early
occupation period.  All forces put the documents to immediate use:  They
represented a priceless source for operational intelligence while the
war lasted and provided crucial evidence for the Trial of Major War
Criminals and the subsequent proceedings in Nuremberg.  At the same
time, the Allies were fully aware of the unique historical value of the
papers.  In 1946, this awareness led to the decision to publish the most
important papers from the German Auswaertiges Amt and the Reich
Chancellery in the Anglo-American edition _Documents on German Foreign
Policy_ (the French joined the project in spring 1947).  The role Nazi
records would play in the ideological conflict (Systemkonflikt) between
the two Germanys was only beginning to take shape, but the GDR
government aptly exploited the destabilizing potential of these records
against the political elite of the Federal Republic in pointed
propaganda campaigns.

Stefan Martens filled a gap in our knowledge on the postwar fate of
German records in France after the withdrawal of occupation authorities
and Wehrmacht troops.  His paper, based on the recent joint effort by
the German Historical Institute in Paris, the Bundesarchiv and the
Archives Nationales, offered an overview of German sources in French
archives as well as material on the occupation of France and Belgium in
German archives.[1]  According to Martens, the origins of French
interest in German archives can be found in the nascent planning for
postwar war crime trials which, in the French case, meant first and
foremost the trial of native collaborators.  To that end, the records of
the German occupational authorities, especially those of the
Militaerbefehlshaber Frankreich (MBF), were indispensable.  But while
the British and Americans entered the Reich well prepared for the
document hunt (e.g., Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force
(SHAEF) had assigned special Target Forces to the task) the French could
not keep abreast of these developments.  As a result, the most prominent
military and political records, including parts of MBF, found their way
into document centers under Anglo-American jurisdiction.

Counting on their recently acquired status as an occupying power, the
French government attempted to gain access to the Ministerial Collecting
Center in Fuerstenhagen bei Kassel and, later, to the Ministerial
Document Branch in Berlin-Tempelhof.  British and American diplomats,
however, were anxious to delay French use of the archives.  It was not
until October 1945 that a French delegation was allowed to set foot in
the document centers, only to be overwhelmed by the tremendous quantity
of largely disorganized paper.  In April 1946 the Americans aided the
French hunt for the records of the Militaerbefehlshaber Frankreich by
sending several boxes of records to Paris.  However, the French quickly
realized that the Americans had held these records for several months
without informing them.  Likewise, the Americans made no attempt to
deliver any further material relating to the German occupation of
France.  This and similar incidents nurtured French suspicion that they
were being deliberately excluded from the document trove.  In his
commentary, Gerhard L. Weinberg pointed out that what might have looked
like a conspiracy to the "very touchy and suspicious French government"
could as well have been due to the chaotic circumstances during the
immediate postwar period.  General confusion rather than design might
have been the source of the French frustration. Regardless of its actual
origins, the perception of being excluded had consequences at a later
date:  In 1952, when the Federal Government demanded the return of the
captured records, the French High Commissioner, Andre Francois-Poncet,
blocked the request by declaring the records to be war booty.  In this
evolving struggle, the French government finally gained some say in the
matter of controlling documents.

Astrid M. Eckert shifted the focus from the French to the British.  Her
paper drew on a recently submitted dissertation[2] and examined the
negotiations for the return of the captured German records from the
British perspective.  Although the methods employed by various branches
of the U. S. Government to deal with the captured records are reasonably
well known,[3] the policies pursued in London have only been examined in
connection with the most prominent case, the so-called Windsor File.[4]
Based on wartime agreements, however, the British were to be an equal
partner in determining the destination of seized archives and records.
The paper focused on the fate of German diplomatic files that were being
edited in England for the projected multivolume publication, _Documents
on German Foreign Policy_.

The seized records and archives became a bone of contention once a West
German government was formed and could reassert itself.  In one of its
very first resolutions, in October 1949, the Deutsche Bundestag demanded
the return of all captured records and archives.  The West German press,
in sometimes nationalistic tones, joined in and held that the Allies had
captured and 'carried away' German national history.  The demand from
Bonn caught the Foreign Office in the process of redefining its policy
towards its former foe.  British diplomats soon wanted to accommodate
the Federal Government and advocated a return of the diplomatic records
in order to remove a possible irritant in the evolving Anglo-German
relations.  This was met by strong resistance from some British
historians who feared the Germans would tamper with returned files to
alter the historical record for political purposes.  The protest was
vigorous enough to successfully preclude an early solution.  British
diplomats thus found themselves in a position of having to choose
between offending the historians of their country or the governments of
the United States and Germany, both of which favored the files' return.
Churchill's personal interest in the return issue, Eckert argued,
weakened the Foreign Office's stand and gave the historians the leverage
to block the negotiations for at least two years.  As Gerhard Weinberg
added, the British historians thus took a position on the return issue
that was exactly opposite to that of American scholars.  Whereas the
British urged delay, the Americans pushed for rapid action.  Absent from
Eckert's presentation was a discussion of the British sensitivity about
German naval archives, especially records on submarine warfare.  These
documents, as Weinberg also suggested, figured centrally in any version
of British return policies.

The paper by Annette Weinke gave a fascinating account of three closely
related elements of postwar German-German affairs:  judicial
Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung, the systemic competition between the two
German states, and their respective foreign policies.  She utilized the
paradigm devised by Christoph Klessmann that views the history of the
two Germanys as a "parallel history of two separate German states,
asymmetrically interwoven with each other" (asymmetrisch miteinander
verflochtene Teilungsgeschichte).[5]

With the Hallstein Doctrine well entrenched, the SED regime attempted to
undermine the Federal Republic's stubborn insistence that it represented
the only legitimate German state.  For that purpose, it conducted
various "anti-fascist" propaganda campaigns, targeting the West German
elite as a bunch of Nazi revanchists.  The logistical basis for this
propaganda offensive lay in the East bloc's large store of German
documents from the Nazi era.  Much of the Third Reich's meticulous
paperwork had survived and was warehoused at the East German party and
state archives or in the archives of the East bloc allies, especially
Poland and Czechoslovakia.  After the Allied War Crimes trials, the
files had been ignored for many years.  One of the most effective East
German propaganda campaigns began in 1957 and was known as the attack on
"Hitler's Blood Judges."  By chance or design, East Germany's
"anti-fascist" agitation was well-timed.  It happened to begin just when
West German attitudes to the Nazi past started to change.  One result of
this shift in West German attitudes was that the Federal Republic's
political and law enforcement authorities began, toward the end of the
1950s, to show--or at least to pretend to show--greater interest in
obtaining the archival evidence of Nazi crimes available in the East
bloc in order to enable the State attorneys to bring charges against
former Nazi judges and prosecutors.

Weinke convincingly argued that, in the long run, the East German
"anti-fascist" campaigns--unsettling as they at first proved to be for
the West--backfired and became at least as unsettling for the GDR.  The
increased interest in Nazi crimes also drew attention to alleged Nazi
perpetrators who still lived unmolested in East Germany.  Even worse for
the SED was the fact that West German authorities, foremost the
Zentralstelle in Ludwigsburg, established informal contacts with the
Polish government that blossomed into a formal working relationship.  As
Weinberg added in his commentary, this relationship threatened to lead
West German authorities to discover "embarrassing documents about
individuals in the GDR"--a situation the East German leadership hoped to
avoid at all costs.  By the middle of the 1960s, then, the relationship
between the two German states on the issue of _Vergangenheitspolitik_
had dramatically changed.  In the late 1950s, the GDR had forced the
Nazi documents on West Germany.  Now, a few years later, the GDR
actively sought to prevent West German prosecutors from gaining access
to the Nazi files in Polish archives.

In his concluding remarks, Weinberg emphasized that fights for files,
then and now, have been marked by a remarkable degree of
short-sightedness.  Like other countries at war, German agencies
generally used the poorest paper possible; all nations preferred to use
their resources for the urgent requirements of the moment.  This means
in practice that the paper base of these documents is deteriorating, and
those who hold them will before long have little but crumbling and
illegible scraps.  It is for this reason essential, Weinberg urged, that
the records be microfilmed, wherever they are.  Over time, physical
possession of the paper records of the first half of the 20th Century
will become less and less significant. There is a window of opportunity
now, Weinberg said, for a general exchange of films, but that window
will close as the originals fall apart.


[1] Stefan Martens, "Frankreich und Belgien unter deutscher Besatzung
und das Schicksal der deutschen Akten nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg," in
_Frankreich und Belgien unter deutscher Besatzung 1940-1944: Die
Bestaende des Bundesarchiv-Militaerarchiv Freiburg_, ed. Stefan Martens
and Sebastian Remus, Instrumenta 7 (Stuttgart:  Thorbecke 2002),
XXIII-LVII.  See also Guy Beaujouan et al, eds., _La France et la
Belgique sous l'occupation allemande 1940-1944. Les fonds allemands
conserves aux Centre historique des Archives nationales. Inventaire de
la sous-serie AJ40_ (Paris:  Archives nationals, forthcoming winter
2002); Wolfgang Hans Stein,  _Inventar von Quellen zur deutschen
Geschichte in Pariser Archiven und Bibliotheken_, Instrumenta 5
(Stuttgart: Thorbecke 2002).

[2] Astrid M. Eckert, "Der Kampf um die Akten. Die
Rueckgabeverhandlungen um beschlagnahmtes deutsches Archivgut,
1944-1958" (Phil. Diss. FU Berlin, September 2002).

[3] Robert Wolfe, _Captured German and Related Records: A National
Archives Conference_ (Athens, OH: Ohio UP 1974).

[4] Paul R. Sweet, "Der Versuch amtlicher Einflussnahme auf die Edition
der 'Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1933-1941,' _VfZ_ 39 (1991):
265-303; Sweet, "The Windsor File," _The Historian_ 59:2 (1997):
263-279.

[5] See Weinke's recently published book, _Die Verfolgung von NS-Taetern
im geteilten Deutschland. Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung 1949-1968 oder:
Eine deutsch-deutsche Beziehungsgeschichte im Kalten Krieg_ (Paderborn:
Schoeningh 2002).


Astrid Eckert
Free University Berlin/German Historical Institute, Washington, D. C.


For a complete listing of all sessions at the 2002 German Studies
Association Conference, please visit <http://www.g-s-a.org>.

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