Preliminary remark: A council of soldiers was probably formed in Stuttgart as early as the first days of November 1918. One of them appeared publicly on 9 November under the leadership of the deputy officer Albert Schreiner, who became the first minister of war in the Bios government on the evening of the same day. In some garrisons, such as Ulm and Ludwigsburg, soldiers' councils were formed before the workers' councils. At the suggestion of several soldiers' councils, delegates from the Württemberg garrisons met for a first state assembly on 17 November under the chairmanship of the new "Head of Warfare" Ulrich Fischer. It decided to form a seven-member state committee, in which the larger locations each sent a representative. The second state assembly on 11 / 12 December expanded the state committee to 21 members and adopted provisions for the Württemberg soldier councils. In addition to the statutes issued by the government for the workers', peasants' and soldiers' councils of 14 December, they formed the organisational basis for all the soldiers' councils within Württemberg. After that, like the workers and peasants councils, they were recognized as the revolutionary foundation of the new system of government, but the executive power should lie exclusively with the government and the traditional authorities. Only at the lowest level were the company councils directly elected, which then met in the next higher level as the battalion council and elected a committee for day-to-day business. This system continued upwards. At the top was the "Soldiers' Council for Württemberg", to which the individual garrison councils sent one delegate per 500 military personnel. They met in the regional assembly and appointed the regional committee, whose chairman was Sergeant Fridolin Wicker22. November 1918 - 25/27 February 1919Deputy official Willy Bettinger25/27 February - 1 June 1919Landwehrmann Typesetter Wilhelm Hitzlerab 1 June 1919Second chairman was Landsturmmann Gastwirt Albert Schaffler.the Landesausschuss, largely composed of members of the (majority) Social Democratic Party, dismissed individual representatives as shop stewards in the departments of the War Ministry, Generalkommandos, etc. In particular, there was a good relationship with the last minister of war, Herrmann, so that the state committee was able to influence Württemberg's military policy until the early summer of 1919 and assert the rights of the soldiers' councils. In special cases, such as during the riots in April 1919, the state committee of the workers' and peasants' councils and the state committee of the soldiers' councils met for joint meetings.The "Provisions on the Reconstruction of the Württemberg People's Army", drawn up among other things by the State Committee, sought to incorporate rights of participation and forms of organisation of the councils into the new Army Constitution of the Republic, which, however, was not applied in view of the different concept for the Reichswehr. Rather, the local soldier councils were abolished after the dissolution of the old army on 30 June 1919. Only seven members of the state committee remained until 30 September. As early as April 1919, Dr. Erich Troß, who had had to interrupt his training for the Bavarian archival service due to the war and who at the time was engaged in reconnaissance work for the Landesausschuss der Soldatenräte, had suggested that the records of the Württemberg councils and other suitable documents should be brought together to form a "revolutionary archive". The two state committees immediately took up this proposal, so that in May "Provisions on the Establishment of a Württemberg Revolutionary Archive" could be agreed with Troß. The request to the subordinate councils to also deliver to this archive has been largely complied with by the garrison councils, with the exception of some workers' and peasants' councils. Only in one case does this also apply to the soldiers' councils of the troops, since their records often reached the Reichsarchiv branch in Stuttgart together with the documents of the troops themselves and are now contained in the M holdings of the Hauptstaatsarchiv. Moreover, Troß was only able to devote a short time to his self-imposed task because he was employed as an editor by the Frankfurter Zeitung. In 1920 the material, which had grown up until then, was handed over to the (today's) Main State Archives and in 1921 it was indexed by a provisional finding aid - probably by Eugen von Schneider. Both this repertory and the relevant files were destroyed in an air raid in 1945. Probably time-related reasons prevented the inclusion of the holdings in the printed general survey in 1937, so that it was only after the Second World War, in accordance with the self-conception of the two state committees, that the holdings of e-possessions were moved in directly behind the holdings of the State Ministry under the signature E 135.In 1957, Robert Uhland again produced a cursory find book, but he assumed that at a later date a detailed indexing and order had to be carried out. When the councils around 1975 found the special interest of historical research and started preparations for the 1918 exhibition of the Main State Archives in 1978, such a comprehensive indexing appeared all the more urgent. However, this could only be carried out with multiple interruptions, mostly within the framework of the training of the trainee officers and mainly the aspiring inspectors. In 1985, the re-drawing of the entire collection was completed, so that a breakdown by provenance was possible. Since then, the documents of the National Committee of the Workers' and Farmers' Councils and some subordinate local councils, i.e. essentially the former tufts 64 - 86, have formed stock E 135a, while the former tufts 1-63 have been combined to form the present stock. The structure of both stocks was developed in the lessons of the 1986 year class of prospective inspectors. The final order and the editing of the finding aid book for E 135b followed in 1989/90; the computer-assisted printout was produced by Hildegard Aufderklamm in the State Archives Ludwigsburg. Initially, no great importance was attached to the written form, but later, in any case, a part of the incoming and outgoing letters in circulation seems to have come to the attention of the individual members. This also applies in general to the subordinate garrison councils. The uniqueness of the tradition seemed to justify a more or less sheet-wise distortion, so that from the mentioned, hardly ordered original clusters about 6000 title recordings grew. After the provenienzgerechte separation also within the individual soldier councils the mostly very small tufts of the same subject could be united in many cases, so that the stock now comprises 1429 tufts in 3.4 shelf meters. Including the Ministry of War, there does not seem to have been any written document regulations in use in the contemporary Württemberg administration that could be applied to the councils in view of their comprehensive competence. The present inventory classification was therefore created inductively on the basis of factual aspects as they arose on the basis of the preserved material, mostly consisting of factual documents. Only the order of the military subjects in the narrower sense was based on the "Einheitsaktenplan für den Bereich der Heeresleitung und des Ministeramts", Berlin 1931: According to the tectonics of the two state archives in Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg, the individual provenances of the "Revolution Archive" should have been assigned to the E, F and M holdings. On the other hand, it seemed appropriate to maintain the original context as it was given by the delivery as a whole to the Central State Archives. The tradition of the garrison councils has therefore been inserted - parallel to that of the local workers' and peasants' councils - as an appendix to the inventory of the National Committee of Soldiers' Councils and has been developed in the same way. Nevertheless, the diversity of the main activities of the National Committee should still become apparent. General discussions and considerations, disputes and disputes, as they were primarily presented in the state assemblies and the meetings of the state committee, are to a large extent reprinted at: Regionale und lokale Räteorganisationen in Württemberg 1918/19, edited by Eberhard Kolb and Klaus Schönhoven (Quellen zur Geschichte der Rätebewegung in Deutschland 1918/19, II), Düsseldorf, n. J.This work also contains numerous short biographies of the political events of the time involved.Ludwigsburg, in March 1991Cordes
