Administrative history: The holdings of "Senate war files" consist mainly of the files that were created separately in the course of the war 1914-1918 next to the Senate registry (cf. 111-1 Senate) and most probably initially filed according to numerus currens. This is indicated by the old signatures, which consisted of the abbreviation K or Krg and a continuous Arabic numerical sequence. With the introduction of this new registry principle, which was intended to make the complex allocations to the complicatedly encrypted subjects of the old Senate registry superfluous, those responsible could not overlook the fact that the war would not end quickly. The choice of the numerus currens for the structure of the collection, although it represented the simplest method of filing, soon had to prove to be disastrous for the recourse to subject matters. This is probably also the reason why different files were created on the same subjects and why topics that were factually close to each other were filed far apart. It is no longer possible today to reconstruct how the registry was restructured in individual cases as a result of the war - and this meant above all that it was determined by the loss of the majority of the previous registrar's employees - due to the lack of tradition. After the end of the war and the expiry of the war-related measures, some of which lasted until the end of the 1920s, the Senate's war registry was enriched with individual registries of commissioners and commissioners. Because some of them had their own registries growing. Thus, for example, the files of the "Senate Commissioner for the Trust Commission for the Provision of Funds for the Tasks Arising from the War" as well as those of the "Central Commission for War Support" or the "Reich Commissioner at the Higher Committee for the Determination of War Damages" reached the old registry. All these registries or parts of registries were probably still united and structured in the Senate registry. The new structure was presumably based on models that can no longer be reconstructed at present. It placed upper groups with capital letters (A to Z - whereby one did not get along with the 25 characters and had to designate the last three groups as Z I, Z II and Z III) over groups with Roman numbers (I, II and III), if this appeared necessary or directly over subgroups with lower case letters (a to z - whereby one did not get along with the 25 alphabet characters also here and then extended with z1, z2, z3 and so on). A deeper structuring could then be done again with lower case letters, the next structuring step again with Arabic numerals, so that in the outermost case signatures of considerable length resulted ( e.g. B II b 121 z 4). Archival history: In this order the registry was handed over to the State Archives at the beginning of the 1930s in a volume of approx. 60 running metres and was kept here until August 1986 without re-drawing and cassation interventions. At this time, H.-P. Plaß, the student councillor temporarily seconded to the State Archives, was commissioned to redraw the holdings. He was told not to change the signatures in the inventory, since the war records had already been used and evaluated scientifically on various occasions. From him was registered up to signature B II b 633 a. In April 1989, the undersigned took care of the larger rest and completed the registration and cassation work by February 1990. In contrast to his predecessor, the undersigned has decided to collect a considerable part of the acts of war according to the following criteria. - files which exclusively dealt with the execution of decisions of the Bundesrat or other orders of the Zentralgewalt and at most documented the instructions for publication in the Gesetz- und Verordnungsblatt or Amtsblatt as an independent administrative act; - files which had no connection whatsoever with Hamburg or which did not include any formative political or administrative contribution from Hamburg; - files which arose for the Senate from all sorts of mailings, but which did not lead to any political or administrative activities; - individual case files, if they were only petitions and rejections due to lack of competence. Thus, attempts were made to document the specific Hamburg conditions, activities and special features. Since the auxiliary registrars at the Senate 1914-1918 could not know which subject matters would lead to actual document growth, they created numerous files, which in the end were occupied only with very few, in very many cases Hamburg not touching documents. On the other hand, other fact files simply expanded so much due to the amount of written material that even the creation of subfiles could not be dispensed with when new files were created, in order to subsequently achieve the necessary differentiation. The cassation from signature B II b 634 onwards concerned approx. 2/3 of the previous holdings. The total circumference was thus reduced from approx. 60 running metres to 36 running metres. The signatures were retained. Only at one point, in the files from the former registry of the Central Commission for War Support, there was a deviation from this. All files of the Central Commission were systematically included in Group C II d 11; they had their own two to four-unit registration numbers from capital letters A to M, Arabic numerals and possibly lower case letters and again Arabic numerals - e.g. B 1 g 2. This would have resulted in signatures of considerable length. Therefore a short signature C II d 11 - 1 ff. was used. A concordance at the end of the directory allows the old numbers to be found. The title formation in the war registry obviously took place quite predominantly after the first document to be filed. Only very few changes were made to titles, even if the focus of the content of the respective file changed as a result of the addition of documents. Only rarely did this necessitate the creation of a new file title; however, both H.-P. Plaß and the undersigned have ample knowledge of the possibility of adapting file titles to the content of the file by means of changes (at about 80
ller files). Since the files on the same or similar subjects reached very different locations not only in the original numerus currens procedure, but also in the newly created classification system, it was necessary from the outset to work with numerous references. These were noted on the files with the numerus currens signatures and were not adapted during the reworking into the new structure. References could therefore only be identified and verified via the provisional repertory, which contained both the original and the new numbers. H.-P. Plaß tried to take all references as references to the individual file titles. Since this led to a whole series of complicated reference signatures for almost every file title, the undersigned has reversed this procedure by replacing individual references with subject, name and place indices. This is probably the easiest way to find relatives. As a rule, the index terms were taken from the titles of the files, only in a few cases was an approximation carried out. (For example, the term "food" is always recorded as "food".) Signed July 1992. Lorenzen-Schmidt Description of the inventory: The inventory consists mainly of the files that were created separately from the Senate registry during the war of 1914-1918 and which reflect the civil needs of warfare in particular. After the end of the war and the expiry of the war-related measures, some of which extended until the end of the 1920s, the Senate's war registry was enriched with individual registries of commissioners and commissioners. Thus, for example, the files of the "Senate Commissioner for the Trust Commission for the Provision of Funds for the Tasks Arising from the War" as well as those of the "Central Commission for War Support" or the "Reich Commissioner at the Higher Committee for the Determination of War Damages" reached the old registry. All these registries or parts of registries were probably still united and structured in the Senate registry. In terms of content, the following main groups are to be named: A. The military readiness for war, B. The bourgeois readiness for war (therein dominating: b. Economic measures), C. The war welfare care, F. Measures for the implementation of the people's nutrition, X. The political conditions after the revolution and its reorganization, Z.I. The demobilization. In addition, material from almost all areas of Hamburg's supreme administrative activity during the war years is included. (LS)
