Federal Archives Research Articles

Men in Closed Venerological Wards of the GDR illustrated by Examples of Berlin, Dresden and Erfurt

While numerous research results are available on the treatment of women in closed venereological wards in the GDR, hardly anything is known about the forced admissions of men to these wards. The aim of this study was to analyse construction of the wards, the admission and maintenance in the wards as well as the extent of the compulsory admissions of men. Unprinted sources were researched in the Federal Archive and State Archive Berlin and in the municipal archives of Erfurt and Zwickau and analyzed using a historically critical method. In addition, printed sources found in databases were researched and evaluated. In the GDR, the closed venereological wards for men were part of closed venereological facilities, each of which included a ward for women. Men and women were accommodated separately. Reasons for the admission of men were sexually transmitted diseases to be treated, suspicion of frequently changing sexual partners (HwG-Verdacht) and disciplinary measures. The medical care of the men corresponded to the contemporary medical standard. Only a few men were committed. The number of beds and compulsory admissions was considerably lower in the wards for men than in those for women. The men were compulsory committed due to having a venereal disease or due to being a sexually promiscuous individual (HwG-Person), while more than 50% of women were committed because of drifting. In addition, men were regarded as reliable subjects in medical care, while women were regarded as defaulting and unreliable. In this respect, the situation of men differs fundamentally from that of women.

Political follower or loyal National Socialist? : On the role of former DGP President Herbert Siegmund (1892-1954) in the Third Reich.

Herbert Siegmund (1892-1954) was undoubtedly one of the most influential German pathologists of the 20th century. He received numerous high honors both during the Third Reich and after 1945. He was, among other things, rector of the University of Münster (1943-1945), holder of the Goethe Medal awarded by Hitler (1944), honorary doctor of the University of Cologne (1949), recipient of the Paracelsus Medal (1953), and president of the German Society for Pathology (DGP, 1954). The almost seamless post-war career was possible above all because Siegmund was counted among the politically uninvolved university physicians after 1945. It was not until after the turn of the millennium that this picture cracked. The article is based on primary sources from the State Archives of Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia, the University Archives of Münster, the Federal Archives of Berlin, the University Archives of Cologne, and the City Archives of Stuttgart, some of which were evaluated for the first time. Two questions are at the center of this article: (1)To what extent can it be proven that Siegmund benefited from the Nazi state in terms of his career after 1933? (2)Are there indications that he served the Nazi regime and its networks? In addition, we will discuss how Siegmund himself described his role in the Third Reich and whether his statements stand up to critical scrutiny. The paper concludes that Siegmund contributed to valorizing the Nazi system. After 1945, he did not position himself at acritical distance from his activities in the Third Reich; rather, he drew of himself - largely unopposed - the image of apolitically blameless scholar.

„Bayreuthiana” jako źródło do badań nad historią drugiej wojny światowej w świetle sprawozdania urzędnika niemieckiego o getcie łódzkim jako case study

Prezentowany artykuł opisuje zasoby materialne, źródłowe pod nazwą Ost-Dokumentation (Dokumentacja Wschodnia). W świetle zdeponowanych w tym zespole relacji autor przedstawia warunki życia ludności żydowskiej w getcie łódzkim podczas drugiej wojny światowej w świetle zachowanego sprawozdania jednego z niemieckich urzędników. Relacja ta została spisana po zakończeniu wojny i umieszczona w zespole archiwalnym przechowywanym w niemieckim mieście Bayreuth. Od nazwy tego miasta autor wprowadził określenie „Bayreuthiana” dla zespołów archiwalnych znajdujących się w tamtejszym Bundesarchiv – Archiwum Federalnym w Bayreuth, w Bawarii, w Republice Federalnej Niemiec. „Bayreuthiana” to pojęcie niefunkcjonujące wcześniej w historiografii polskiej i niemieckiej. Zespoły archiwalne tam zdeponowane stanowią bogate źródło informacji o historii społecznej, stosunkach międzyludzkich, relacjach polsko-niemieckich w okresie międzywojennym, także w czasie drugiej wojny światowej i po 1945 r. Niewątpliwie „Bayreuthiana” w formie relacji pisemnych osób mają charakter bardzo subiektywny. Są jednak pewnym, specyficznym źródłem informacji. Jedna z takich relacji, sprawozdań liczy trzy strony i dotyczy getta łódzkiego. Autorem jest Friedrich Prager, który był urzędnikiem wyższego szczebla podczas wojny. Po wojnie osiadł w Garmisch-Partenkirchen i w 1955 r. sporządził swoją relację. W relacji przedstawia getto łódzkie, warunki w nim panujące, życie codzienne, zachowania ludności żydowskiej. Próbuje przedstawić warunki życia Żydów w getcie jako w miarę normalne, pokazując funkcjonowanie różnych instytucji, takich jak sklepy, apteki, szpitale.

Electronic Book of Memory as a Historical Source for Studying the Irretrievable Human Losses of the Kuibyshev Region in the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940

The article considers a mass electronic source on the problem of irretrievable human losses of the USSR during the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940, available to researchers in the form of a database on several information portals. It is indicated that it was based on the printed Book of Memory dedicated to the fallen soldiers in local wars and conflicts of the twentieth century. The analysis of its representativeness is carried out. The exceptional reliability of the resource is confirmed by the fact that during its creation a huge array of documents from federal and local archives was included in the scientific circulation. The information capabilities of the database for studying the human damage of one of the regions - the Kuibyshev (now Samara) region - were revealed. The relevance of the study is caused by insufficient study of this topic, with the undoubted importance of understanding the deed of all the fallen in the performance of military duty. The author uses the unique capabilities of an electronic resource to fill in the “blank spots” in the issue of human losses. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that quantitative methods of study are applied to it for the first time within the framework of regional history. The number of dead Kuibyshevites during the “winter war” (1737 people) was established, their analysis: age composition, distribution of losses by rank, military branch, cause of death, chronology was carried out.

Shifting Racial Boundaries and Their Limits. German Women, Non-European Men, and the Negotiation of Sexuality and Intimacy in Nazi Germany

This essay examines the cultural, ethnic, and “racial” boundaries of the National Socialist “Volksgemeinschaft” based on planned, failed, and completed marriages between German women and non-European men in the early twentieth century. From evidence in the relevant files from the Federal Archives and the Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, this essay discusses male partners from various countries of origin as examples of the role of the state in racially mixed unions. The reactions of the institutional actors and the couples themselves demonstrated the surprising ambivalence of National Socialist racial policy due to political and diplomatic requirements.

Федеральное архивное агентство как государственный орган, предоставляющий государственные услуги

Федеральное архивное агентство как государственный орган, предоставляющий государственные услуги

From the epistolary heritage of the editors of “Ukrainskaya zhizn’” magazine (1912–1917) (Moscow)

The article provides an overview of the letters of the editors of “Ukrainskaya zhizn’” (“Ukrainian Life”) magazine (1912-1917) (Moscow) A. Salikovsky and S. Petlyura, stored in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) and federal archives. The letters contain information about the activities of the editorial, cooperation with the editors of a Moscow magazine called “Golos Minuvshego” and the newspaper “Russkie Vedomosti”, as well as the editorial activities of A. Salikovsky before moving to Moscow. Of particular interest are the letters addressed to academician V. Vernadsky, academician F. Korsh, “a friend of Ukrainians”, who collaborated with the editorial, to P. Milyukov, the chairman of the fraction in the party Narodnaya Svoboda (“People’s Freedom”) in the State Duma. The article uses both published and unpublished letters from 1908, 1910, 1912-1915. The publication introduces new documentary sources about the activities of the editors of “Ukrainskaya zhizn’” magazine into scientific circulation and may be of interest to historians, researchers of the biography of A. Salikovsky and S. Petlyura.

Die Angehörigen der „Einheitsfront der Zahnärzte“ im „Dritten Reich“ und nach 1945

In June 1933, 38 leading German professors of dentistry met in Leipzig to commit themselves to the Nazi “leader principle”. This study examines this hitherto overlooked group of dentists, their relations to National Socialism and their career paths - before and after 1945. The focus was on the following research questions: What made these men stand out? Which characteristics did they share, which separated them? But above all: How did the early and explicit commitment to the National Socialist leader principle affect the professional careers of individuals? Who was able to succeed and who was not, and what were the main reasons for this? The study is based on a wide range of archival sources, in particular the Federal Archives in Berlin as well as various university, state, and city archives. These archival sources have been supplemented and compared with the relevant existing secondary literature. The results of the analysis can be summarized in four key statements: (1) For the majority, participation in the “Einheitsfront” proved to be career-promoting. (2) The group of younger university teachers (under 40) and those who had joined the SS and the NSDAP benefited more than the others. (3) Career setbacks were experienced primarily by lecturers who were either subsequently regarded as politically unreliable or who - despite being National Socialists - got into power struggles within the NSDAP. (4) Those who were able to expand their careers during the Third Reich also found their way back on the road to success after denazification. These findings are discussed and illuminated on the basis of individual cases.

Материалы Серпуховского уездного комитета РКП(б) как источник по истории советского военного строительства 1918-1919 гг., делу «Ставка» о «заговоре в Полевом штабе» Реввоенсовета Республики и реакции большевистского руководства на взрыв в Леонтьевском переулке

The Central State Archive of the City of Moscow (TsGA of Moscow) holds documents that expand existing notions on the Soviet military construction of 1918-19, the formation of military intelligence and counterintelligence in Soviet Russia, and the “third wave” of mass Red terror in 1919. These documents are mostly found in the seemingly insignificant fond of the Serpukhov uezd committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Since in the autumn 1918 – summer 1919, the Field Staff of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic was located in Serpukhov and its military commissar, head of the registration department, and founder of the Soviet military intelligence, S. I. Aralov actively worked in the Serpukhov uezd committee, the committee protocols are of great importance for studying the formation of the Red Army and its special services. The documents on admission to the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and party registration of the Field Staff senior officials, brothers Alexei and Pavel Vasiliev contain new information on the personnel continuity in the Operational Department of the People's Commissariat for Military Affairs of the RSFSR and the Field Staff. Protocols of the reports of the old Bolshevik A.A. Antonov at sessions of the Serpukhov uezd bodies of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) clarify the existing notions on the calamity of June 1919, which took place on the eve of the events associated with the arrest of the first Commander-in-Chief of all the armed forces of the Republic J. J. V?cietis and some of his employees in July 1919, the cleaning of the Field Staff initiated by the old Bolshevik, longtime associate of Lenin S.I. Gusev who replaced S.I. Aralov at his posts. There are also documents containing information on the Bolshevik leadership reaction to the events related to the explosion in the building of the Moscow Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on September 25, 1919, when 12 Bolsheviks were killed and 55 received wounds of varying severity. These materials complement and correct data from the documents stored in the federal archives, in particular, in the Russian State Military Archive, which keeps documents on the history of the Red Army in 1918-41. For instance, it turns out that it was decided to arrest the bourgeoisie and other “counter-revolutionaries” with their subsequent imprisonment in a concentration camp created specifically for this purpose in Serpukhov district.

Мониторинг российских сайтов архивных учреждений (интернет-ресурсов) с точки зрения поисковой оптимизации

Sites as virtual representatives of memory institutions on the Internet perform many functions of these institutions. Currently, archival site building is developing quite actively, and the attention of researchers is focused on organization, data layout, and design. One of the most important tasks of a memory institution is to attract users. However, literature has been paying insufficient attention to optimization of the sites’ search engines. Thus, the author has turned to studying the sites of the federal archives in terms of their search engine optimization. Comparative analysis of the sites has been carried out according to such criteria as site quality index, number of external links to the resource, total social activity, as well as adaptability of the site for mobile devices. The PR-CY.ru service has been used as an analysis tool. Site Quality Index (IQS) is a new indicator introduced by Yandex instead of citation index to characterize the site’s usefulness to the user, taking into account a large number of factors and more truthfully reflecting the state of the information resource. According to the study, the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and the State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA) have the highest value of IQS, and are, thus, good sites from the user’s point of view. The majority of sites of federal archives have low IQS and need further improvement. An important indicator in website promotion is number of links to the website. In number of external links, the GARF and the Russian State Archive of the Navy (RGAVMF) are in the lead, while the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) and the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) number most links from social networks. Sites of the RGAVMF and the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA) are optimized for mobile devices. Few sites have responsive design, which complicates access to their data. The author notes the need for regular site monitoring by means of web analytics. As a free site analysis tool, she recommends the PR-CY.ru service.

АРХИВЫ И ВЕЛИКАЯ ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННАЯ ВОЙНА В СОВРЕМЕННОМ ИНФОРМАЦИОННОМ ПРОСТРАНСТВЕ: ПУБЛИКАЦИЯ ДОКУМЕНТОВ НА САЙТЕ ФЕДЕРАЛЬНОГО АРХИВНОГО АГЕНТСТВА И ПОРТАЛА "АРХИВЫ РОССИИ"

Basing on the study of the Internet publications of archival documents, the article considers the issues of publishing digitized copies of archival documents in the electronic environment on the website of the Federal Archive Agency and the “Archives of Russia” portal. The publications were prepared within the framework of the state programs “Patriotic education of the citizens of the Russian Federation” in 2006–2020, approved by the government of the Russian Federation. The present research is the analysis of the virtual exhibition “Stalin-Churchill-Roosevelt. A joint fight against Nazism”; the publications “How and for what we are fighting with the Poles. The anti-Polish program of the OUN in archival documents”; “Ukrainian nationalist organizations during World War II”; “How the Polish underground ‘helped’ the Red Army to defeat Nazi Germany. 1944–1945. Marking the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising of 1944”; “General Vlasov. The story of betrayal”; “Victory. 1941–1945”; “Stalingrad. Commemorating the 75th anniversary of the defeat by the Soviet troops of the German-fascist troops in the battle of Stalingrad”; “Before and after Munich. Archival documents tell the story. Marking the 80th anniversary of the ‘Munich agreement’ ”; “1939: from ‘appeasement’ to war”; “Nuremberg trial documents from Russian archives”; “Documents of the Soviet era”; “Tempered in the Great Patriotic War...”; “Voices of the outstanding Soviet commanders of the Great Patriotic War”; “Officers of the First World War – generals of the Great Patriotic War”. The main attention is paid to the investigation of the composition and the content of publications, their reference-search engine and finding aids, the advantages and disadvantages of that method of publication. The scientific novelty of the article consists in the study of the Internet publications about the Great Patriotic War, in the development of a new research direction – Archeography in the electronic environment (Digital Archeography).

Border Treaties and Interstate Disputes in Africa: An Extension of the Normative Theory in Explaining the Malawi-Tanzania Conundrum

The colonial project for the partition of Africa in the second half of the 19th century, which culminated in the 20th century, led to the disgruntlements among African countries in the post-colonial period. One discontentment manifests itself in the interstate border disputes. This paper is a critique to colonial scholarship which maintains that African borders were defined by colonial treaties with great precision. While I acknowledge the colonial border treaties as the foundations of the modern African states, this paper argues that most of the treaties were imprecise, incomplete, ill-defined, used vague documentation, routinely ignored ethnic composition of the territories and did not reflect realities on the ground, and, consequently staked interstate conflicts and wars in post-colonial period. To advance this argument, this paper is situated in the normative theory to explain the Malawi-Tanzania border dispute in the Lake Nyasa area, which reflects an ill-fated legacy of colonial boundary making process. Data for this paper are mainly drawn from the archival sources accessed from the British National Archives in the United Kingdom, Federal Archives in Germany, SOAS; and another documentary information accessed from various libraries – public and private. Findings divulge that the Anglo-German Agreement of 1890 which situated the boundary between Malawi and Tanzania contained some anomalies entrenched in the contradictions within the treaty, limits and exercise of sovereignty of the two powers and geographical realities. The paper sums up that the two countries cannot use the treaty as one and the only justification for situating the boundary either on the eastern shore or in the middle of the lake. The treaty may, however, provide the basis for the two nation-states to renegotiate and compromise their shared boundary and rectify the errors noted.

Russian-Chinese families in the 20th century: Emergence and characteristics1

This may well be the first article about the history of mixed Russian-Chinese families in Russia and the USSR. The study is based on sources in federal, regional and local archives, mainly of Siberia and the Far East, statistics, and the press. It notes that the great gender imbalance in almost exclusively male Chinese migrant community meant that Chinese men chose Russian women as life partners. The decline of Russia’s male population during the First World War and the Civil War only exacerbated this trend. First recorded in the late nineteenth century, this phenomenon became widespread during the twentieth, not only in the Far East, but also in other areas with large populations of Chinese workers, such as Donbass. Wives in such marriages were mainly peasant women, although on occasion Cossack women and even noblewomen, often widows, took Chinese husbands. The brides were invariably younger than their spouses and tended to be housewives. However, some worked with their husbands in small businesses. These mixed couples tended to have fewer children than those that were fully Russian. The vagaries of Sino-Soviet relations during the twentieth century led to several waves of deportations of such families. Thus, in 1938 some were exiled from their places of residence to Xinjiang, Kazakhstan or the Amur region. While forced migrations considerably reduced the size of the Chinese community, they did not destroy it. The authors conclude that new Chinese immigration to Post-Soviet Russia follows the pattern set in the twentieth century’s first half, as do mixed marriages.

Multi-modal page stream segmentation with convolutional neural networks

In recent years, (retro-)digitizing paper-based files became a major undertaking for private and public archives as well as an important task in electronic mailroom applications. As first steps, the workflow usually involves batch scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) of documents. In the case of multi-page documents, the preservation of document contexts is a major requirement. To facilitate workflows involving very large amounts of paper scans, page stream segmentation (PSS) is the task to automatically separate a stream of scanned images into coherent multi-page documents. In a digitization project together with a German federal archive, we developed a novel approach for PSS based on convolutional neural networks (CNN). As a first project, we combine visual information from scanned images with semantic information from OCR-ed texts for this task. The multi-modal combination of features in a single classification architecture allows for major improvements towards optimal document separation. Further to multimodality, our PSS approach profits from transfer-learning and sequential page modeling. We achieve accuracy up to 95% on multi-page documents on our in-house dataset and up to 93% on a publicly available dataset.

Genealogy as auxiliary historical discipline

The review describes the recently published monograph written by the Kuban historian Andrey Viktorovich Dyukarev “Cossack genealogies in the historical and cultural context of the Kuban (based on the ataman VG Naumenko pedigree, which replenished the historical library of theKrasnodarTerritory. The relevance and scientific novelty of the presented publication is noted.The author presents the historiography of the problem proposed by the author and the source base. The attention of readers is drawn to the main sources from the leading federal and regional archives of theRussian Federation, which formed the basis of the study.The reviewer reveals the main structural elements of the proposed work. Attention is drawn to the originality of the applications proposed by the author of the monograph, which help to better understand the essence of the research and the reasons for addressing this complex subject.Some shortcomings of the reviewed publication are noted, which in general do not detract from the merits of the work presented to the general reader.

MILITANT ATHEISM IN THE LATE 1940S – EARLY 1950S IN THE KEMEROVO REGION

The article features the policy of militant atheism during the period of late Stalinism in the late 1940s – early 1950s. The research is based on various studies on relations between the state and religious institutions. The authors used unpublished materials from regional and federal archives to investigate foreign and domestic affairs that triggered the change in the state religious policy in 1948. The paper describes the main prohibitive and restrictive measures against the Russian Orthodox Church at the state level. In the case of the Kemerovo region, the authorities attempted to close five Christian communities within one year. They did not recognize property rights on the place of worship and claimed that the churches were in unsatisfactory technical condition. The authors established that the claims of the authorities were merely formal, and the gross administrative measures to restrict religious life contradicted Soviet legislation.

Archival sources of the Russian Orthodox Church missionary activity history among the old believers of the Orenburg diocese of the second half of the XIX - early XX centuries

The historical period considered in this paper is one of the important periods for the economic, political and spiritual development of the Russian state. The Orenburg Region at this stage was a multi-confessional region, where, despite the leading role of the Russian Orthodox Church, both non-Christian and Christian denominations, including a variety of old believers consent and sectarianism, were spread. In this regard, the anti-sectarian missionary activity of the official Orthodoxy aimed at both the old believers and sectarians became particularly relevant. Archival documents in the collections of Federal and regional archives form the basis of this problem study. The paper presents an overview of unpublished sources and their source analysis. The author analyses such groups of archival sources as statistical materials, records of management sources, among which a special place is occupied by the Governors and diocesan reports, documents of personal origin, legislative materials. Among these groups of sources, the most valuable ones are records of civil and spiritual departments. The review allows to conclude about the variety of types of archival documents and their various informative features. The presented classification is not final and can be supplemented.

Between pragmatism and rhetoric: a critical assessment of Greece’s defence and foreign policy in the 1980s in light of new primary sources

ABSTRACT In contrast to other European countries in which the eighties were characterized by the cultural dominance of the ‘New Right’, Greek politics was dominated by the rise of the Greek Socialist Party (PASOK). Unlikely to the West European Socialist or Social Democratic parties of the time, Greek idiosyncratic socialism was associated with a strong nationalistic and anti-Western, i.e. anti-NATO, anti-American and anti-European rhetoric. Another feature of this period was the change of Greece’s position regarding the Greek-Turkish dispute. Greek Socialist administration in 1981–1989 was associated with increasing tensions with Turkey. The present paper critically assesses Greek foreign and defence policy during this period by drawing on archival sources from various countries (documents of the State Archive of Israel, CIA archive, the Federal Archives of the Republic Germany (Political Archive of the Foreign Ministry, Archive of the Foreign Ministry of the Former East Germany and Archives of the Mass Organizations and the Political Parties of the Former East Germany) as well as military spending and arms imports registers to show the discrepancy between rhetoric and real changes implemented by the Greek Socialist Government during its first two consecutive terms in office.

Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews: A Photographic Album, Paris, 1940-1944Sarah GensburgerGeographies of the HolocaustEdited by Anne Kelley Knowles, Tim Cole, andAlberto Giordano

In 2009, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) published the first volume of a planned seven-volume encyclopedia of camps and ghettos meant to document all sites of Nazi incarceration. More than 42,000 were identified, far more than the researchers had first estimated. The two books under review relate in significant ways to that sobering statistic. Sarah Gensburger’s meticulous presentation of a photographic album containing eighty-five originally uncaptioned images, discovered in the Federal Archives in Koblenz, takes a found object that is in some respects similar to the famous Auschwitz Album, and carefully dissects it. It is not known who took the pictures, though it appears they were collected, and perhaps produced, by Germans stationed in Paris and associated with the work depicted. Organized taxonomically by staff at the Munich Central Collecting Point, one of several depots created by the Allies to temporarily house looted objects and artworks they discovered at the end of World War II with the purpose of aiding in postwar restitution, the Koblenz album proceeds thematically from an introductory section depicting scenes in Paris, to views of the loading and unloading of trucks and then trains, to images of crates, and then to groups of looted objects themselves: garments, toys, tools, kitchenware, lamps, radios, clocks, furniture, and pianos.

Lettere inedite di Elio Vittorini negli archivi svizzeri (1942-51)

This article examines the ties that Elio Vittorini had with various German intellectuals and publishers during World War II. Of central importance among these figures is Werner Haftmann, who until 1940 was chief assistant of the German Art History Institute in Florence and subsequently translated Conversazione in Sicilia [Conversations in Sicily] for Steinberg Verlag in Zurich. A file housed at the Swiss Federal Archives in Bern contains correspondence between Vittorini and Selma Steinberg, who together with her sister managed the family publishing house. The letters shed light on their relationship, as well as on other events, such as the Italian translation of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and the dispute with Silone fomented by the Swiss press and then assuaged by Franco Fortini. The appendix contains further correspondence from the University of Milan’s Vittorini Archive, including letters from Vittorini to Selma Steinberg, as well as those to Federico Hindermann, the translator of Vittorini’s works into German.