History of the authorities: The territorial reorganization of Germany by Napoleon brought the former margraviate of Baden between 1803 and 1810 almost a doubling of its territory and an enormous expansion of its population, as well as in 1803 the elevation first to electorate and in 1806 finally to grand duchy. This increase in the size of the country and its people made it imperative that the heterogeneous political system be restructured and unified in administrative terms. The organizational edicts issued between 1806 and 1809 served the realization of this goal. In addition to the Privy Council and Deputy Minister Johann Nicolaus Friedrich Brauer (1754 - 1813), the Baden State and Cabinet Minister Sigismund von Reitzenstein (1766 - 1847) was above all responsible for the administrative reorganization and modernization of the Grand Duchy. The Organisational Edict of 26 October 1809 divided the Grand Duchy of Baden into 66 sovereign and 53 ranked offices. The offices of the rank were gradually abolished, the last in 1849, after the final renunciation of their sovereign rights by the rank masters. In the case of the provincial district offices and upper offices, mergers and dissolutions within the framework of organisational changes led to a reduction in the total number of administrative structures in 1936/1938 from originally 66 to 27 after the changes ordered in the administrative structures during the National Socialist era. Originally, the district offices were purely state authorities and as such primarily responsible for general state administration, but also had to carry out tasks of the police and - until the establishment of their own court organisation in 1857 - of the judiciary, in particular civil jurisdiction. As subauthorities, district offices were subordinated to the district directorates as medium instances - the district office Constance, created in 1809, was first subordinated to the directorate of the Seekreis with its seat in Constance. The organisational reform of 1832 enlarged the scope of these funds and replaced the originally ten district directorates, with the exception of the Seekreis, which was named after rivers, with four district governments: Government of the Seekreis, Oberrheinkreis, Mittelrheinkreis, Unterheinkreis. The Constance district office was now under the control of the Seekreis government. Finally, the Law on the Organization of Internal Administration of October 5, 1863 abolished the district governments without substitution as the medium instances of state administration and subordinated the district offices directly to the Ministry of Interior. As a link between local and central authorities, the law of 1863 (amended 1865) installed four state commissionariats, namely Konstanz, Freiburg, Karlsruhe and Mannheim, each of which was headed by a state commissioner with a seat and vote in the ministry. The Constance District Office was assigned to the Sprengel of the Constance State Commissariat. In 1864, the Grand Duchy of Baden was divided into eleven district associations as local self-governing bodies without state tasks, retaining the district offices and state commissionariats as state administrative authorities. The Konstanz district association, based in Konstanz, comprised the state administrative districts of Engen, Konstanz, Meßkirch, Pfullendorf, Radolfzell (abolished in 1872), Stockach and Überlingen. State organ with the district federations was the administrative official of the district, in which the district federation had its seat, as a district captain. The Executive Board of the Constance District Office was also the District Governor of the Constance District Association. The corporate body of the district association was the district assembly of elected members. The Kreisverband Konstanz is thus the actual "ancestor" of the Landkreis Konstanz as a local self-governing body. 1924 the name of the executive committee of the district had already been changed to Landrat. By the county regulation of 24 June 1939 the 1864 established county federations were abolished and replaced by counties. In the Nazi dictatorship, however, their formally maintained powers of self-administration were only on paper, since the decision-making and decision-making powers were transferred from the district assembly to the district chairman appointed by the Ministry of the Interior, who was assisted by three to six district councils only in an advisory capacity. The area and authority of the new administrative district of Constance as a municipal self-governing body was now congruent with the administrative district of the state administration. In the reorganization of the administration after the end of the war in 1945, the legal supervision of the districts, which now became real local self-governing bodies with democratic legitimation, was initially transferred from the state commissioners to the (South) Baden Ministry of the Interior. Following the formation of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg, it was replaced by the Regierungspräsidium Südbaden as the central authority for the administrative district of Südbaden - the Regierungspräsidium or Regierungsbezirk Freiburg since the administrative reform of 1971. The district and later Landratsamt Konstanz was repeatedly changed from its establishment in 1809 to the year 1952. Particularly noteworthy here is the increase due to the abolition of the Radolfzell district office in 1872, whose municipalities were all assigned to the Constance administrative district. Another increase for the administrative district (since 1939 administrative district) Konstanz brought the abolition of the district office Engen in the course of the law over the new division of the internal administration from 30 June 1936 in the course of the, whose official municipalities were distributed on the sprinkles of the district and/or district offices Konstanz, Donaueschingen and Stockach. Further changes in the district of Constance as a result of the Baden-Württemberg district reform, which came into force on 1 January 1973, lie outside the period under consideration and are therefore not mentioned. Inventory history: Before the beginning of the registration work, the files of the Constance District Office/Landratsamt were distributed among the following holdings:a) B 715/1, /2, /3, /4, /5, /6, /7, /8, /9, /10, /11, /12, /13, /14, /15, /16, /17, /18, /19, /20, /21, B 730a/1b) E 24/1c) G 15/1, /2, /3, /4d) W 499/1e) S 51/1The stocks mentioned under a) and e) were first combined to form stock B 715/1 (new). Foreign provenances in these holdings were taken and either assigned to other holdings of the Freiburg State Archives in accordance with their provenance or handed over to the Karlsruhe General State Archives for reasons of competence. in a second step, the holdings of the Constance District Office, which had been formed from files delivered by the Constance District Office under b), were integrated into holdings B 715/1 (new). Thirdly, all files of the provenance Bezirksamt/Landratsamt Konstanz with a term up to and including 1952 were taken from the holdings mentioned under c) and transferred to the present holdings. In well-founded exceptional cases, such as when the proportion of written documents created after 1952 in a file was limited to a few documents, files with a term beyond 1952 were also included in B 715/1.Fourthly, all files of the provenance "Landratsamt Konstanz" from the provisional stock W 499, which contains the written material from the stocks 129 to 228 of the General State Archives Karlsruhe, which reached the State Archives of Freiburg during the mutual equalization of holdings, were also included. The pre-signature 1 contains the last signature used in the Freiburg State Archives before the new indexing and the pre-signature 2 the penultimate signature used in the Freiburg State Archives or the signature formerly used in the Karlsruhe General State Archives. The present holdings were recorded by Solveig Adolph, David Boomers, Anja Fischer, Joanna Genkova, Edgar Hellwig and Wolfgang Lippke. Dr. Christof Strauß was responsible for the planning, organisation and coordination of the work, final correction and final editing of the finding aid was carried out by the undersigned. The stock B 715/1 now comprises 6347 fascicles after its redrawing and measures 72.00 lfd.m.Freiburg, May 2010 Edgar Hellwig
