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introduction
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
introduction On 14 april 1945, a british bomber dropped several five-ton bombs over the Bauhausberg in Potsdam. They pierced the roof of the German National Archive’s warehouse and fell through seven floors of documents, exploding in the basement. The combination of incendiary devices and high explosives melted the steel girders holding up the warehouse’s immense collection of books and papers. As the posts fell in, the building collapsed. Germany’s Great War records burned in the inferno.1 The quiet, tree-lined streets along the Teltow Canal had been home to the Reichsarchiv (Imperial German Archives) and its military historians since the autumn of 1919.2 In November of that year, officers from the Kriegsgeschichte des Großen Generalstabes (War History Section of the Great General Staff) transported the Reich’s war documents away from the political instability in Berlin.3 They shepherded boatload after boatload of records down the canal, piled high atop open barges, toward the former Reichskriegsschule, an imposing rectangular building crowned by a distinctive tower and set next to an elegant mansion that would become the Reichsarchiv warehouse.4 In these two buildings, Reichsarchiv 1 See Uwe Löbel,“Neue Forschungsmöglichkeiten zur preußisch-deutschen Heeresgeschichte,” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 51 (1992): 143. 2 A short introduction to the history of the Reichsarchiv is Karl Demeter, Das Reichsarchiv: Tatsachen und Personen (Frankfurt: Bernard und Graefe, 1969). See also Matthias Herrmann, Das Reichsarchiv 1919–1945 (Ph.D. diss., Humboldt Universität, 1994). 3 Markus Pöhlmann, Kriegsgeschichte und Geschichtspolitik: Der Erste Weltkrieg. Die amtliche deutsche Militärgeschichtsschreibung, 1914–1956 (Schöningh: Paderborn, 2002), 79. 4 Alexander L.P. Johnson, “Military Histories of the Great War,” Journal of Modern History 3, no. 2 (1931): 277. historians—civilian in rank but officers by trade—would toil away for more than two decades on an official history of Germany’s war effort.By the spring of 1945 they had produced three series of books, two popular and one academic, and assisted researchers working on hundreds of regimental histories and dozens of films.5 They guarded access to Germany’s war records and actively moulded an official memory of the war that would remain consistent in the shifting intellectual and political currents of interwar Germany. Theirs was the most comprehensive history of Germany ’s military effort in the Great War. It would be the only secondary source to be written with unfettered access to a long-ago destroyed documentary record. The April 1945 bombing raid destroyed those records of the sort that British historians are accustomed to using in their studies of the Great War. War diaries, orders, operational plans, maps, ration cards, situation reports, and telegrams were all burned. But, as was revealed in the early 1990s, some of the records housed in the historians’ offices in the Reichskriegsschule did in fact survive. In August 1945 they were confiscated by the Soviet government, some eventually ending up in Moscow, others remaining in Potsdam. All were inaccessible to Western historians until they were returned to the Bundesarchiv in 1990. This block of some three thousand files and fifty boxes is of great importance; note, however, that they cannot replace the papers lost in April 1945. They are the working files of Germany’s official historians—that is, they are the files that were generated in the course of researching and writing the official histories.6 As Helmut Otto notes, they are comprised of “business documents, correspondence, research notes, studies, field reports, manuscript drafts, copies of corrected drafts, galley proofs, copies of documents from military and political authorities and agencies, excerpts from officer’s personal war diaries and writings with notes from the editors, and newspaper clippings.”7 As working papers they are partially digested history, closer to the raw materials than other secondary sources, but they are not a comprehensive primary archive.8 Their greatest contribution has been to confirm the value of the official histories and the work of the Reichsarchiv historians.9 xxvi introduction 5 Markus Pöhlmann,“Yesterday’s Battles and Future War: The German Official Military History , 1918–1939,” in Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia and the United States, 1919–1939, ed. Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 230. 6 Helmut Otto, “Der Bestand Kriegsgeschichtliche Forschungsanstalt des Heeres im Bundesarchiv -, Militärisches Zwischenarchiv Potsdam,”Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 51 (1992): 433–34. 7 Ibid., 433. 8 For a complete file list, see I. Zandek and H. B...