Preliminary remark: On 3 January 1907, War Minister von Marchtaler ordered the establishment of a special war archive, abbreviated to K. A., of the Central Department of the War Ministry. It shall administer and maintain the existing old files of the War Ministry, its so-called old registry, keep and process the officer stock lists kept until 1874, other older files of the War Ministry or the War Ministry. of its departments, if for historical or other reasons they seemed to be worthy of preservation, to collect documents of permanent military or war-historical value from authorities, military units and private individuals, from whom they may retain title, and to reclaim the archival records handed over to the Haus- und Staatsarchiv in 1900 as soon as space conditions permitted.In addition, surveys on the history of the Württemberg army and troops and on the personal circumstances of former officers, as far as they were to be taken from the existing officer stock lists and were primarily of a statistical nature, surveys on circumstances and institutions in the Württemberg army, as far as the then existing ones were not touched and as far as they resulted from the files kept at the war archive, were transferred to the war archives.In addition to the library of the Ministry of Württemberg, which remained in the Central Department, the new institution had to acquire as many troop histories, biographies of Württemberg officers and rankings, court and state handbooks as possible, as well as several rooms in the building of the Ministry, which were too small altogether, and which did not allow for a satisfactory arrangement of the archives. This did not change until 1914, when the new building of the War Minister Jum could be occupied. The management was taken over by the colonel (retired) Wilhelm Strack von Weißenbac, who had been aggregated to the minis rium and who was still assigned a paymaster aspirant and, if required, individual non-commissioned officers and teams were commanded to provide assistance. The incoming documents - archive, library and collection material - were to be divided uniformly into 16, Roman-counted "series", whose titles were "Königliches Haus und Land", "Organisation und Formation des Militärs", "Feldzüge", "Handbibliothek", "Bau- und Festungspläne", "Stempelsammlung" and others. The further splitting into "series" resulted in signatures of up to five sections for the individual volumes and tufts (e.g. 11010 A f). To what extent preserved, very concise find book, which breaks off with Group III "Campaigns", covers all or only parts of the documents collected and recorded up to the outbreak of World War II, must remain open. On the whole, the war archives did not show any significant development: during the war Strack still had a small collection of newspaper clippings on individual fights, until he died on August 9, 1917. At almost the same time, Major Winter, who had been commanded to provide services in the War Archives since 1915, was placed at the disposal of the Deputy General Command, while Major Osterberg, retired Adolf Osterberg, was assigned to provide services to the War Ministry on 1 June 1915, namely its newly formed War History Department. By the end of the war the number of employees had risen to 27, including those employed only temporarily, 41, mostly reserve officers and Landsturm members. At the end of September 1916 the department was renamed "Kriegsarchiv 1", abbreviated to Kr. A. 1, while the previous Kriegsarchiv was given the name "Kriegsarchiv II", abbreviated to Kr. A. II. : The War Archive I had the task of collecting war diaries made by the field troops, viewing them and sending them to the Deputy General Staff of the Army in Berlin for transcription and examination, to show the "share of the Württemberg troops in the World War" in a sober scientific presentation by some officers who had been damaged by the war and had been ordered to the War Ministry, and to show them, with the help of the former War Minister von Schnürlen, the "share of the Württemberg troops in the World War", (1)in the series "Schwäbische Kunde aus dem großen Krieg" to describe and publish individual combat experiences in more popular form, (2)to create a collection of portraits of officers and army officials killed during the war and to publish them in the form of a commemorative plaque, "outstanding deeds of officers and individual troop divisions" and "heroic deeds", d. to present and publish the results of the war in a more popular form.h. to process reports requested by the field troops on the deeds of the non-commissioned officers and teams awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class or the Golden Medal of Military Merit, and to forward them to the local press, to talk about special achievements in combat in lectures and to make the texts available to the public. As the name suggests, they were presented immediately at the express request of the latter, then evaluated in the departments of the War Ministry, and finally, after a certain period of time, handed over to the War Archive I for permanent safekeeping and inspection for the aforementioned war-historical series. In January 1916, on the instructions of the War Minister, the thematic collection of newspaper clippings, which had been kept by the department since the beginning of the war and which had been added at that time until March 1915, was transferred to the War Archive I in order to be brought up to date here as quickly as possible. The individual subject areas of the collection were now designated with capital letters and further subdivided as of October 1917. As with the Central Department, excerpts from the Schwäbisches Merkur and other daily newspapers were collected, including the "Berner Bund", the "Münchener Neueste Nachrichten", and the "Vossische Zeitung", among others, while the Württemberg party papers pronounced as "Beobachter" or "Tagwacht" continued to be evaluated by the Central Department for the series remaining there. In August 1918, the collection was transferred to the newly created "Department H" of the Ministry, later "Ministerial Department". This department subdivided the excerpts from July into 17 new subject groups, which lasted until November, occasionally December 1918, and were brought to an end again in the War Archive after the dissolution of the Ministerial Department at the beginning of 1919. In the spring of 1918 there were five (working) groups a-e, some of which overlapped somewhat in their competence, and in the autumn of 1918 - after the formation of the ministerial department - they were regrouped into the groups a-d. The groups a-e were then divided into two groups. (3) : After the end of the war, Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Osterberg was reassigned to the General Command on 13 January 1919. A few days earlier, the staff of the Kriegsarchiv I had already elected Friedrich Hötzer, the vice sergeant of the Landwehr, from among its members to the board of directors. At the same time, the temporary closure was discussed, but it did not take place. In any case, the former commander of the mountain regiment, Major Theodor Sproesser, was commanded to the War Archive I on 23 April 1919.The "Kriegsarchiv" (War Archive), which Sproesser then managed until the end of 1920, united the previously separate War Archives 1 and II; it continued to form a department of the War Ministry and from August 1919 was subordinate to its successor, the Reichswehrbefehlsstelle Württemberg, and from October 1919 to the Landeskommandanten, while the personnel was made available by the Heeresabwicklungsamt Württemberg or the subordinate Abwicklungsamt of the former War Ministry. After protracted negotiations about the future shape of the military archives and, among other things, about a possible continuation of the work "Anteil der württembergischen Truppen am Weltkrieg" (Share of the Württemberg troops in the World War), the war archive was moved at the end of December 1920 from the building of the former Ministry of War in Stuttgart, Olgastraße 13 to the former rifle magazine of the secondary artillery depot in Stuttgart, Gutenbergstraße 109, and in January / March 1921 formally integrated into the then Reichsnebenarchiv, the future Reichsarchiv branch.As business transactions, as mentioned above, at first almost and later still to a considerable extent ran through other departments of the Ministry, mainly the Central Department, no systematic filing of documents developed for the War Archives during its existence. The main part of the Kriegsarchiv II consisted of archive material received from other provenance sites; Kriegsarchiv I focused on the drafts and, in part, fair copies of the series and individual writings processed here, followed by the reports of the troops received for safekeeping, among others.In the Reichsarchivzweigstelle / Heeresarchiv a part of these documents has been combined with other relevant documents to form new pertinence stocks: The various newspaper cuttings collections of the Ministry were added to the later stock M 731 "Druckschriften und Zeitungsausschnittsammlungen" and in individual cases continued until 1938/1942.The field postal letters were partly newly compiled and by a multiplicity of further letters they belong today to the holdings M 750/1-3 "field postal letters I-III". The photographs collected for the work "Anteil der Württembergischen Truppen am Weltkrieg" (share of the Württemberg troops in the World War) should form the basis of the holdings M 705/1 "Königsalben" (king's ointments) under inclusion of no longer individually ascertainable extensions.Photographs of fallen officers were stored in the stocks M 707 - M 709 "Portrait Collections I-III" without this always being possible to prove. The few remaining fact files and numerous report series were compiled by the Army Archives Council Captain of the Reserve Franz Knoch to the stock "War Archive". Furthermore, Knoch worked in parts of the archival material collected by the former Kriegsarchiv - for example from the former registry of the Generalquartiermeisterstabs until 1870 -, then "historical" records of other departments of the ministry, other authorities and troop units, i.e. mostly summarizing reports and memoranda, and finally still "various scattered files and records of Württenberg army members, which were purposefully incorporated into the Kriegsarchiv collection for lack of other classification possibilities". Knoch apparently felt himself that the documents united in this way in one inventory did not quite fit together, nevertheless he completed the find book in 1943. Probably in the same years the majority of the now available archive units were bound in booklet or book form, as was usual at that time with the Army Archives, even if this was not always satisfactory, especially in the case of "General Correspondence". Joachim Fischer and archive inspector candidate Walter Wannenwetsch, the documents classified here from the period up to 1870, then from 1983 onwards Senior State Archives Councilor Dr. Günter Cordes and archive employee Werner Urban further individual pieces in order to insert them into other holdings according to their provenance. Accordingly, only those documents remained which had grown up in the course of business of the War Archives (I and II). In addition, the collection of newspaper clippings kept by the Kriegsarchiv was taken from the aforementioned holdings M 731 "Druckschriften- und Zeitungsausschnittsammlung des Kriegsministeriums" and reintegrated here. In contrast, the other collections of the War Archive mentioned above - field mail letters, photographs - were converted to such an extent that their original condition could no longer be reconstructed in the Army Archives, and they were therefore left as archival collections. As early as 1972/75, Fischer created a separate finding aid book for the business diaries of the War Archive, which had not yet been recorded, and which could now be incorporated unchanged into the new repertory. The order and structure of the holdings are based on the original tasks of the war archives, as Fischer and Wannenwetsch had intended according to a preliminary draft. The order - as well as the naming and spelling - of the listed formations is based on the "Übersicht Friedens- und Feldformationen (Behörden und Truppen) des ehemaligen XIII. Armeekorps und deren Abwicklungsstellen" published in 1920 by the Heeresabwicklungsamt Württemberg (Military Processing Office Württemberg). The creation of separate local, personal and expert directories for the files/volumes and newspaper clippings is intended to facilitate access to the two different groups of archival records. In addition, the keywords for the files/volumes are based on Westenfelder's comprehensive subject title photographs, revised by Fischer, Cordes and Urban. On the other hand, the title recordings made by former Colonel Kurt Hiller around 1940 for the unfinished inventory of newspaper clippings by the Army Archives employee Oberst D. Kurt Hiller, which have now been taken over almost unchanged, go beyond general details of the contents and, especially in the notes on the contents - and thus also in the present index - bring conspicuous details. However, the material content of the newspaper clipping volumes is much more extensive, as can be seen from the content overviews compiled by the War Archives and bound to the volumes; however, it was not possible at present to compile the content of the new finding aid book in detail, which was desirable in itself, mainly for personnel reasons.In the reorganisation of the holdings, 66 archive units were combined with other identical subjects, 24 further, mostly double copies were removed; 349 tufts and volumes were integrated into other holdings in accordance with the provenance, while 2 newspaper cuttings were inserted here again. The collection now comprises 1032 volumes and tufts in 17 metres of shelving. Literature: Joachim Fischer: Das württembergische Kriegsarchiv. On the history of the military archives of Württemberg. In: From the work of the archivist. Festschrift für Eberhard Gönner (Publications of the State Archive Administration Baden-Württemberg Vol. 44). Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1986Stuttgart, December 1985Cordes notes: Comments:(1) The aim of this work was to avoid a situation in which the achievements of the Württembergs would be underestimated in a future General Staff Organisation. The first three volumes were presented to the king on the occasion of the government's anniversary in 1916.(2) Two volumes, edited by Lieutenant Robert Silbereisen of the Reserve and Captain Georg Schmückle of the Reserve, were published by the end of the war.(3) See the appendix
