Preliminary remark: Karl Ludwig Eugen Schall (born on 25 November 1885), died on 30 January 1980) joined the Grenadier Regiment of Queen Olga (1st Württembergische) No. 119 in 1904 as a junior flag officer, reached the rank of lieutenant general there until World War I, after the outbreak of the war took part as company officer in the battles of the regiment on the West and East Front and was wounded twice. From 1915 Schall worked as a captain and general staff officer, often occupying changing general staff positions at General Command XIII Army Corps, at the 26th Infantry Division, the 14th Infantry Division, General Command V, and at the General Command of the German Armed Forces. Army Corps, 18th Reserve Division, General Command IV Reserve Corps and 10th Reserve Corps. He participated in the fights in Flanders, in the Somme, in the Champagne, in the Ardennes and Argonne, in the Meuse and near Verdun until his demobilisation in 1918. He was mainly concerned with strength and loss reports, interrogation of prisoners, evaluation of aerial photographs, mapping, position building and pioneer questions. From 1933 he again held several changing positions in the General Staff of the V. Army Corps as a Major, in 1939 was Commander of the Stuttgart II Military District as Lieutenant Colonel, from 1940 as Lieutenant Colonel, later as Colonel General Staff Officer in the 554th Army Corps. Infantry Division, with the Army Group A, with the Commander-in-Chief in Serbia, then Chief of the Field Commandantur 747 in Nîmes and was last transferred in 1944 against his own wishes as a war history teacher to the Kriegsakademie. As a pensioner Schall still studied archaeology in Tübingen until his doctorate. Further information on Karl Schall's life can be found in a handwritten curriculum vitae in Bü. 182, in the diaries in Bü. 181 and in the personal file in stock M 430/2, Bü. 1804 with information on his military career until 1919.Parts of the estate of Karl Schall, above all written material from his military service and extensive collections, were offered to the Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart by his son Brigadegeneral a.D. Wolfgang Schall in March 1980 and, after an initial inspection at the estate's premises in April 1980, were handed over to the library of the Hauptstaatsarchiv and the archival records in Department IV (Military Archives) have since formed the M 660 estate of Karl Schall. Since the estate of Karl Schall got into complete disarray and no pre-archival classification scheme was recognizable, it was necessary to develop a classification scheme after the indexing, which should do justice to the multi-layered structures and most different documentation forms, particularly since in the Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart no uniform classification scheme for estates finds application. The documents from the officers' activities, correspondence and personal papers, which besides their general historical significance have a close personal connection to the deceased, were clearly separated from the multi-layered collections. The structure of the documents from the officer's activity reflects the military career of Schall. These are mostly personal copies of official documents in the form of hectographies, prints and other copies, as well as drafts and private documents. A document, which had been taken from the business transactions of the office, was reintegrated into the relevant holdings of the military unit in the Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. There is a reference in this repertory. The private correspondence was sorted according to correspondent groups and correspondents. Posters and wall attacks, military maps and non-military maps were incorporated into the corresponding collections of the Main State Archives J 151, M 640 and M 650 mainly for conservation reasons. Nevertheless, these pieces have also been incorporated into the present repertory in the form of references, whereby the ordering scheme of the map holdings M 640 for military maps and M 65 0 for non-military maps has been adopted. Maps which have a recognisable connection to documents in Part A have been left there or reunited and have also been incorporated into the collections of the estate as references. For the collection of newspaper clippings, individual newspapers, printed publications and manuscripts from the fields of history, contemporary history, politics, religion, language, literature, science and technology, it seemed necessary to develop as finely structured a classification scheme as possible, since this collection, with approx. 500 numbers, represents the largest part of the collection and was previously only divided into the categories1. Military, 2nd Politics and Contemporary History, 3rd Science and within these categories only chronologically ordered, which made the chronological classification of the frequently undated newspaper clippings possible. It seemed appropriate to make the very multi-layered estate accessible by means of as comprehensive a list of subjects, places and persons as possible. Only a few small map sections from maps that are already available, sketches and notes that seemed to be no longer comprehensible individually and were not in any recognizable connection to other documents, file folders and packaging material were collected. The estate of Karl Schall contains above all informative material about the type of warfare in the First World War. Of particular importance is also the material on non-Württemberg units, most of whose records were destroyed in a bombing raid on Potsdam in April 1945. The drawings on the maps from World War I provide extensive information on the course of the front, combat directions, troop movements, position building and destruction in the front areas and thus complement the M 640 map holdings well. Also noteworthy is the extensive written material on the trials before the military tribunal in Nuremberg against the generals Curt Ritter von Geitner, Hubert Lanz, Karl von Roques and Eugen Wössner, which contains excerpts from the indictments and defence material. In the collections the history of the 20th century up to the 70s is reflected in an astonishingly comprehensive and descriptive way. The collection is not subject to any restrictions of use. In January and February 1984, the M 660 estate of Karl Schall was listed and arranged by Markus Baudisch, a candidate archive inspector, as a rehearsal work in the context of the state examination for the upper archive service and comprises 697 books in 1.55 metres.
