The Captured and Displaced German Files of WW II in Soviet and Russian Archives

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Although in their work on source materials, historians are always confronted with the consequences of archival policy, that policy itself is only rarely an object of historical research. One exception is Astrid Eckert’s study (2004 ) investigating the “struggle for the files” between the nascent German Federal Republic and the victorious Western Allies in the Second World War, in particular Great Britain and the US. A comparative study looking at Soviet and Russian activities in dealing with German archival material after World War Two remains to date a desideratum. There still is little if any knowledge on under what circumstances, with what intentions and according to what criteria German archival materials were acquired and brought to the Soviet Union, how they were catalogued, preserved, distributed to different archives, agencies and research facilities, and how they were used. In addition, there is to date no overview of the “trophy collections” of German provenience in the regional state archives of the Russian Federation and in the archives not subject to the control of the Federal Archive Service of the Russian Federation. The research project sketched here is intended to fill in these gaps. Situated at the interface between the history of culture, history of historiography, of institutions and of diplomacy, the project can contribute, over and beyond a necessary stocktaking, to a better understanding of the polycratic structures in the late-Stalinist Soviet Union on one hand, and can on the other reveal how and with what aim during the Cold War archival documentation was employed and mobilized on the “ideological front” in the East-West confrontation. The prerequisite for the project’s implementation is the scientific initiative agreed upon in 2011 between the DHI Moscow, the Federal Archives Agency of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation and the Russian Historical Society for digitalizing the German documents stored in Russia. This project has already facilitated the joint cataloguing of files contained in the Defense Ministry Archive of the Russian Federation.