1814-1930 (1945) The holdings 70 of the Mainz Municipal Archives comprise all preserved files of the Mainz Municipal Administration from the period 1814/16 to 1930/45, i.e. the period when Mainz belonged to the Grand Duchy or People's State of Hesse, therefore the holdings are also called "Hessian Archives". The "Hessian Archive" also includes the files of the occupation office during the French occupation of 1918-1930 (fonds 71) and the old registry of the Mainz City Library (fonds 72). The personnel files of the Hessian period were also separated and added to the personnel files of the city archive (here: accesses before 1962). The files of the stock 70 originate from the mayor's office of the city of Mainz and from individual municipal offices or companies. Also files of the former district office Mainz are in the inventory. This goes back to the initiative of the former government director Richard Falck, who in the 1920s was active as an assessor in the district office and worked to ensure that the files relating to Mainz were not handed over to the state archives in Darmstadt, but were transferred to the city archives. Apart from a few exceptions, the records of this collection end in 1930. The municipal files from the National Socialist era (1933-1945), which were in the main registry of the town hall, were burned during a bombing raid on Mainz in August 1942. The files were also destroyed at various other municipal offices in 1942-1945. The personnel files that survived the war were not affected. It is not possible to prove for all partial holdings when the files reached the city archives or who handed them in. In the access books from 1909 to 1945, a total of 90 entries of various sizes can be found, which according to their provenance and duration can be assigned to the "Hessian Archive" and which are also largely to be found in today's holdings. Some accesses are no longer to be found and have probably been cashed (e.g. files of the garden administration and the rental agreement office). A large part of the listed deliveries is accounted for by the finance and accounting departments of both the general administration and the city. Companies, but also the local citizen registers, the trade diaries, files on fruit prices and the fruit market, on the poor and welfare, on the electricity and waterworks, election records and various deliveries of school files are mentioned in the access books. A list of the proven accesses can be found in the electronic file of the city archives under Findmittel/Sonstiges. Also after 1945 still files were handed over, which were assigned to the existence 70, in the activity report of 1948-1950 9 Faszikel air-raid protection files (cf. 70/1028 ff.) are mentioned, 1951/52 4 volumes citizen registers of the 19th century are mentioned. Ordnungsarbeiten ab 1935 (nach den Tätigkeitsberichten des Stadtarchivs) The order of the files of the Hessian period was the responsibility of the administrative secretary Wilhelm Danz from April 1935, who was active in the archive from that time. In the year 1940 4533 file bundles were formed. In 1943 390 ordered bundles were added. The type of content of the order is not reported in the activity reports. During the Second World War, a total of 92 bundles of today's 70 files had been moved to the Heldburg in Thuringia. Until 1960, there was no evidence in Mainz for these outsourced files. The files reached the central archives of the GDR in Potsdam via a collection depot in Merseburg and were not returned to the city archives until December 1986. In the "Verzeichnis der von der DDR zurückkommenen Archivalien" these bundles are listed under the numbers 586-678. After their return, they were sorted into the "Hessische Archiv" (Hessian Archive), which had meanwhile been arranged according to the file plan, and before the files were renumbered they bore the signatures "DDR-Akten Nr. [Bündelnummer lt. o. g. Verzeichnis]". During the Second World War, the archive holdings remaining in the house had to be moved several times due to the air raids. On 27.02.1945, "a small, not important, archive of modern records" was destroyed. The two upper floors of the municipal library burnt out, causing the remaining files in the house to become very disordered and the staff had to clean them of debris and dust. The files of the stock 70 were also completely confused. City secretary Danz began anew with a reorganization, in 1948 the ordered stock comprised 291 running meters, in 1952 more than 400 running meters, in 1954: 600 running meters. In 1952 there is still talk of a "jumble of single leaf pieces which are read out of the rubble or come to light from the torn, fallen apart bundles". At that time the collection was divided into 13 sections, which were listed in the activity report for 1950/51-1951/52. In his annual report for the years 1952/53-1953/54, Wilhelm Diepenbach cites an example of the work of organizing single sheets: "In earlier decades, the local court also had to deal with matters of poor law. Consequently, documents relating to this matter were classified under the factual term "local court". Now all such documents are taken out and classified in the civil alphabet under surnames." In the 1950s, Wilhelm Danz had separated out a mountain of files from the Hessian period and planned them for cassation (among them were the files on the Jewish community!); the timely intervention of his archive colleagues prevented the destruction of these valuable archival records. In 1957/58, after the departure of Danz, the archivists noticed that the system according to which the bundles of files had previously been set up (the 13 departments mentioned above) no longer met the requirements, and they had to begin anew with reordering work. The holdings were roughly sorted according to alphabetical keywords, thus preparing the final reorganization. Whether this refers to the order according to the Hessian municipal file plan of 1908 cannot be inferred from the activity reports, but is probable. Wilhelm Danz's successor was the archivist Siemsen, followed by Mrs. Schmelig. As late as 1963, Ludwig Falck, who later became archive director, wrote in the commemorative volume "De Bibliotheca Moguntina": "The uniform order ... is still in progress and will take a long time, since this work has been made very difficult by all kinds of adverse fates." After the conclusion of the order work and the listing of the file bundles formed and inscribed by the archivists according to the registration plan for Hessian mayor's offices from the year 1908, the files could be found with the help of the file plan and by examination in the magazine whether files were available to a file plan department. There wasn't a list of files. The departments and sub-items of the file plan were considered signatures. A first list of files was drawn up in the 1980s by Doris Braun, a graduate archivist. It comprised 1406 numbers and the file plan departments I (head of state) to XII (church affairs) and thus about the first quarter of the entire stock. In 2003, Ursula Kwasniewski, an archivist, began to enter the existing list of files into the archive database "Faust". The unrecorded files were then numbered consecutively and these new file signatures, together with the file titles and file numbers on the file covers, were recorded in the database. The building files in the inventory deviate from this numerical order. They had already been entered some years earlier according to the sections "Bauakten vor 1900" and "Bauakten nach 1900" and within these groups alphabetically according to building owners. This registration corresponded and corresponds to the physical order of the building files which are at the end of the inventory. After entering the approximately 22,000 file titles, Ramona Göbel (later: Weisenberger), a graduate archivist, read the titles on the basis of the database Correction and created a classification, which is largely based on the preliminary order according to the registry plan of 1908. Mainz, November 2008 Ramona Weisenberger
