History of the Inventor: The Reichsmarineamt (Reichsmarineamt) was created as the successor authority to the Imperial Admiralty with effect from April 1, 1889, in the form of a cabinet order (in addition to the Navy Cabinet and the Navy High Command). As the supreme Reich authority, the Reichsmarineamt was responsible for the organisation, administration, technology, armament and fortification of the navy. At the same time, it exercised Reich competence vis-à-vis the merchant navy and in the fields of maritime transport, nautical science and fisheries protection. The RMA was in charge of the Imperial Shipyards, the Shipbuilding Inspection Commission, the Naval Depot Inspectorate, Coastal District Offices, Station Headquarters, Naval Military Sacrets, the Naval Observatory, the Naval Commissioner of the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal and the Kiautschou Government. The RMA was divided into the following organizational units: Central Department, General Navy Department, Shipyard Department/Submarine Office, Construction Department, Administrative Department, Weapons Department, Nautical Department, Kiautschou Protectorate Central Department, Medical Department, Justice Department, News Office. On 15 July 1919 the powers of the Reichsmarineamt were transferred to the Admiralty by decree of the Reich President. Characterisation of content: With the exception of the Arms Department, the Medical Department, the Legal Department and the Central Bureau of the Navy, all other organisational units in this inventory have files. Of particular importance from the Central Department are the State Secretary's files on the development of the Navy and the preparatory work for the Fleet Acts. An important part of the former hand files is also in the estate of State Secretary Tirpitz. The files handed down from the central department contain documents on protocol questions, launching, awarding of orders and central organisational matters as well as Reichstag material and a complete series of the "Allerhöchsten Kabinettsordres" for the navy from 1889 to 1918. The activities of the General Maritime Department on matters of organisation and service operation of ships and naval parts, personnel and replacement matters, questions of training in weapons service, uniforms, organisation of education, administration of justice, supply matters, military questions of ship construction and maritime law are well documented. The files of the Construction Department provide a source of considerable importance for the history of the navy and technology. This includes construction files for all heavy and medium-sized combat ships completed by 1914, as well as approx. 10,000 construction plans and other technical drawings for ships and boats. In addition, scientific research results on strength issues, material development, drag tests and general building regulations have also been handed down. The files of the budget department fully document the development of the naval budget, in particular the financing of the fleet building programmes. Here you will also find budget and administrative files on the establishment of the German protectorate Kiautschou as well as on pension and retirement matters of officers, teams and civil servants. Also well preserved are the files of the administrative department, which mainly document catering, clothing and accommodation matters of the navy. Of particular note are the files on numerous foundations for which the Reichsmarineamt was in charge. In connection with the responsibility for food and clothing, extensive series of files on the care of the German population during the war were produced. The traditional files of the news agency contain documents on the economic situation in Germany, the development of shipping, maritime traffic and fleet interests, censorship measures, the collection and distribution of war news and foreign propaganda. An extensive collection of newspaper clippings is also included. Also worth mentioning are the correspondence series on association matters, especially the German Fleet Association. The Nautical Department has files on sea mark and coastal signal matters, cutlery excerpts, travel reports and expeditions. From the shipyard department responsible for the equipment and maintenance of ships, shipyards and vehicles, only a small remainder of files on submarine matters, occasionally also torpedo matters, has been preserved. The departments and departments of the shipyard department responsible for the processing of the submarine system were made independent in 1917 to the submarine office. The documents produced during the short period of its existence reflect the measures taken to promote submarine construction, in particular the material provision during the final phase of the First World War. Worth mentioning here is still material about the planned technical evaluation of war diaries of the submarines. Scope, explanation: Holdings without growth593 lfm24181 AE, approx. 10000 ship drawings/plans (RM 3/12,000-22,600) Citation method: BArch, RM 3/...

Inventory Description: The Naval Airship Department was established by Allerhöchste Kabinettsordre on 3 May 1913 from the "Aviation Personnel of the Imperial Navy" next to the Naval Airship Department as an independent department with the temporary location Johannisthal. (1) The commanders of the departments were given "judicial, disciplinary and leave powers". In all training and technical matters, both departments were under the control of the State Secretary of the Reichsmarineamt, in all others of the inspection of coastal artillery and mines, as well as the head of the "North Sea Naval Station". (1) The State Secretary of the Reich Naval Office, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, established 1 June as the day of formation by order of 8 May 1913. (2) As early as April 1912, members of the navy, including Corvette Captain Friedrich Metzing, were commanded for training at Deutsche Luftschifffahrts-AG. The airship command was subordinated on 15 July 1912 under the designation "Luftschiff-Detachement" with the Johannisthal site near Berlin Metzing as commander. (3) After the death of the commander of the naval airship department Friedrich Metzing in the accident of "L 1" on 9 September 1913, Corvette Captain Peter Strasser became his successor. Responsibility for the airship sector in the navy lay with the BX "Luftschiff- und Fliegerwesen" department of the shipyard department of the Reichsmarineamt formed on 12 October 1912. On 1 April 1913 an organisational change followed: Department BX was restructured to become the "Aviation Section" (Section BX with Divisions BXa and BXb). (4) At the beginning of the First World War, the command structure of the Naval Airship Division changed. By the Most High Cabinet Order of 29 August 1914, the office "Commander of the Aviation Departments" was created as the highest central command post of the entire naval aviation. (5) The Naval Airship Department and the Naval Aircraft Department were subordinated to this. The cabinet order assigned the following tasks to the new commander: Provision and training of personnel, management of schooling outside departments, test drives and maintenance of aircraft operational capability. The Most High Cabinet Order of May 1, 1916 assigned the naval airship division Cuxhaven (Nordholz) as a new location and divided the division into airship troops. (6) On November 23, 1916, the Naval Aviation Departments were divided into the Airship and Aircraft divisions by the Most High Cabinet Order. (7) The post of Commander of the Naval Aviation Divisions was transformed into Commander of the Naval Aviation Division and the Commander of the Naval Airship Division was elevated to "Chief of Naval Airships". The newly appointed Naval Airship Leader was in charge of the Naval Airship Division and the Naval Airships. The newly created position was subordinate to the command of the high seas armed forces in "matters of use and training of the North Sea front airships, to the State Secretary of the R e i c h s m a r i n e a m t , in technical and experimental matters and in matters of the school and experimental airships, and in all other matters to the naval station command of the North Sea". (7) For the airships deployed in the Baltic Sea, a new "Airship Ladder East" was formed as division commander. (7) The latter acted independently or according to the orders of the Commander-in-Chief of the Baltic Sea, but remained subordinate to the Commander of the Naval Airships. (8) The post of Airship Manager East was vacated in November 1917 due to staff shortages and the cessation of airship operations in the Baltic Sea. (9) This structure remained in place until the end of the war. After Strasser's death in the "L 70" on 5 August 1918, the post of commander of the naval airships was not reoccupied. (10) Due to the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles to abandon military aviation in Germany, the Naval Airship Department was dissolved in Nordholz on 10 December 1920. (11) During the First World War, naval airships were used for reconnaissance in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, securing and supporting mine search units, sighting and reporting of enemy naval forces and mine barriers, reports on merchant shipping and for offensive voyages, in particular on Great Britain. Commander of the Naval Aviation Departments 29 August 1914 - 23 November 1916 Rear Admiral Otto Philipp Leader of the Naval Airships 23 November 1916 - 5 August 1918 Frigate Captain Peter Strasser from 5 August 1918 August 1918 unmanned (representative: Hans-Paul Werther) Airship Leader East 23 November 1916 - November 1917 Corvette Captain Hans Wendt Naval Airship Troops Status: May 1916 (12) I. Nordholz II. Fuhlsbüttel III. Ahlhorn IV. Hage V. Tondern VI. Seerappen VII. Seddin VIII. Düren IX. Wainoden Status: November 1918 (13) I. Nordholz III. Ahlhorn IV. Wittmundhaven V. Tondern VI. Seerappen VII. Seddin-Jeseritz XI. Wainoden Characterisation of the contents: The collection covers the period 1914 to 1938, with a focus on the deployment of the naval airship department in the First World War from 1914 to 1918. The records also include other provenances based on circulars and forwarded communications from other or superior agencies such as the Navy Admiral Staff, the Commander of the Reconnaissance Ships of the Baltic Sea or the Commanding General of the Air Force, etc. The collection is also available in German. The operations of the naval airships are reflected in the tradition. The focus is on the operational and enterprise files for the reconnaissance voyages in the North Sea and Baltic Sea as well as the attack voyages, especially in Great Britain. War diaries and orders are available on a large scale for this purpose. The war diaries were created for individual airships or naval airship troops. Further few file complexes are found to the organization and to the personnel of the naval airship department. The structure of the documents mainly consists of war diaries, orders (daily and departmental orders) and so-called driving reports of the numerous reconnaissance and attack drives. The trip reports contain information on the trip task, names of crew members, weather conditions, technical data and square maps with the marked route. In addition, there are radio messages (some encrypted), spark telegraphy bearings, weather and barometer maps and telegrams. The collection also includes photographs, press articles, technical drawings, sketches and a large number of maps. The overdelivery is not complete. Only the war records have survived. Documents from the pre-war and post-war periods may have been destroyed in the air archives in 1945. State of development: Online-Findbuch Vorarchivische Ordnung: Bestandsgeschichte After the end of the First World War, the documents of the disbanded naval services, including the Naval Airship Department, were collected in the War History Department of the Admiral Staff of the Navy (established on 15 February 1916) for the purpose of setting up a new naval archive. From 1919 the name of the naval archive was changed to "Head of the Institute for Naval History and Chairman of the Naval Archive". A second renaming took place on 22 January 1936 in "Kriegswissenschaftliche Abteilung der Marine". However, this did not belong to the Reichsarchiv, but was subject until 31 March 1934 to the Inspectorate of Naval Education, then to the Chief of Naval Management, and later as a subordinate authority to the Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine. During the First World War some war diaries (RM 116/185-199) were already forwarded to the admiral's staff of the Navy for information and were thus integrated into his written material, but are handed down in this inventory. During the Second World War, naval records were moved to Tambach Castle near Coburg on 22 November 1943. (14 ) After the end of the war, the archives were confiscated by US troops and taken to London. There the files were filmed on a large scale, combined into bundles, provided with consecutive F-numbers ("Faszikel", "File" or "Fach") and partly with a seven-digit number with the prefixed letters "PG" ("pinched from the Germans"). The archives were then handed over to the British Admiralty. In the 1960s, the marine files were returned to the Federal Republic of Germany as part of the process of returning files and were transferred to the Document Centre of the Military History Research Office in Freiburg i.Br. With the transfer of the Document Centre in 1968, which is based on the 1968 interministerial agreement between the Federal Ministry of Defence and the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the documents were transferred to the Federal Archives and Military Archives moved from Koblenz to Freiburg. In 1977 an access with a photo album to the naval airships (access number 2005/77) took place, which was transferred under RM 116/200 into the inventory. An LL signature (LL 410) refers to a storage in the air archive. A note in English on the file cover indicates a seizure by British and/or US troops. During the file repatriations, the photo album was also handed over to the Document Centre at the Military History Research Office, where it received an I L signature (I L (B) 11). (15 ) The tradition is not complete. A large part of the documents may have been transferred to the Luftarchiv at that time and destroyed in 1945. In 1936, the Luftwaffe set up its own archive under the name "Kriegswissenschaftliche Abteilung der Luftwaffe" (War Science Department of the Air Force) and collected the entire archives of the Air Forces of the Army and the Navy Air Forces. (16) It may have included parts of the naval airship department files, which would justify the small size of the file delivery. Archivische Bearbeitung A rough list of files was available on the holdings, which contained only imprecise file titles and durations as well as old signatures. An evaluation of the documents was not carried out due to the loss of written records and the resulting gaps in the records before 1945. The existing rules of procedure were retained. The documents had already been formed; most of them were in Prussian thread stitching, a small part in archive folders. The file structure is uneven; thus, in part, uniformly formed and coherent files were found for a task or an assignment. On the other hand, there were also documents with heterogeneous contents, such as aerial reconnaissance and attack drives. The inventory of the stock was carried out with the archive management system of the Federal Archives BASYS-S-2. The files were recorded and classified on the basis of the specified overdelivery due to a lack of organisational documents. The old signatures F and PG numbers as well as the file numbers were recorded. The terms "Detachement" and "Trupp", for the units subordinated to the Naval Airship Department, were not used uniformly in the files despite the same meaning. The collection contains numerous photographs and maps, the content of which is linked to the files and have therefore been left in their context. Only the oversized maps which were not sewn in due to damaged files were removed for conservation reasons and are now stored together in a map folder in the inventory under RM 116/201. The files are in a poor state of conservation. The damage ranges from dissolved thread stitching, mechanical damage as a result of use, to paper decay and ink corrosion. The collection needs to be restored soon. The stock is not completely foliated. Scope, explanation: Holdings without increase 7.4 linear metres 198 AU Citation method: BArch, RM 116/...

History of the Inventory Designer: Georg von Müller, Admiral Born on 24 March 1854 in Chemnitz, died on 18 April 1940 in Hangelsberg November 1889 Married Elisabeth Luise von Montbart; March 1900 Elevated to hereditary nobility Military career (selection) May 1871: Entry into the Imperial Navy; August 1878: Appointment as lieutenant at sea; May 1879: Commanded torpedo weapon; 1882-1884: Travels abroad to West India and South America on S.M.S. "Olga" and S.M.S. "Blücher"; November 1884: Statistical Office of the Admiralty; May 1885 - March 1886: Military Political Advisor (Marine Attaché) at the German Embassy in Stockholm; March 1886: Promotion to lieutenant captain; until spring 1889: changing uses on board and on land, including participation in the company in Samoa in Aug./Sept. 1887 on board S.M.S. "Bismarck"; spring 1889: entry into the newly created Imperial Naval Cabinet; September 1891: Commander gunboat S.M.S. "Iltis"; November 1892: Head of Personnel in the High Command of the Navy; Autumn 1895 - February 1898: Personal Adjutant of Prince Heinrich of Prussia; November 1898: Commander of the Great Cruiser S.M.S. "Germany"; April 1899: Chief of the Staff Ostasiatisches Kreuzergeschwader; May 1899: Promotion to Captain at Sea; April 1900: Head of Department in the Navy Cabinet; October 1902 - September 1904: Commander Linienschiff S.M.S. "Wettin"; September 1904: Duty wing adjutant of Kaiser Wilhelms II; 1905: Appointment as rear admiral; July 1906: Head of Imperial Naval Cabinet; 1907: Appointment as vice-admiral; 1910: Appointment as admiral, also general adjutant of Kaiser Wilhelms II.November 1918: Farewell to active service Description of the inventory: As head of the naval cabinet, Georg Alexander von Müller had the opportunity to exert far-reaching influence on all naval affairs beyond his duties as head of personnel policy. His key position was based, on the one hand, on a special, personal relationship of trust with the Emperor and, on the other hand, on the fact that all personnel decisions of the Navy were in his hands and that Müller was called in for all lectures. Müller served as a link between the Emperor and the various Immediate Offices of the Navy. During the war, Müller increasingly met with reservations and criticism from the Naval Corps of Officers for the widespread view that the head of the Naval Cabinet delayed or blocked measures for a more aggressive naval war. Müller also entered into a permanent conflict with Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and was publicly attacked by him and his followers during and especially after the war. Although Müller, in contrast to numerous other members of the Naval Corps, did not publish any memoirs, a whole series of published articles from Müller's pen testifies to this permanent conflict. Müller's influence on naval affairs in general and on warfare in particular declined as a function of the importance of Kaiser Wilhelm II. As Supreme Warlord. In October 1918, Müller was largely on the fringes of the project of a militarily senseless, but myth-founding sacrificial corridor of the deep-sea fleet. As the duty wing adjutant of Wilhelm II and chief of the naval cabinet, Georg Alexander von Müller belonged to the immediate circle of Wilhelm II for more than a decade and a half and throughout the First World War. His records reflect in a special way the court society as well as the personality and work of the monarch in the last years of the German Empire. Content characterisation: The collection comprises only the seven handwritten diaries of Georg Alexander von Müller. They extend over a period of 47 years, beginning with Müller's entry into the Imperial Navy in 1871 up to his retirement as Chief of the Naval Cabinet in 1918. The records are enriched with photos and drawings. Other documents from the estate edited by Walter Görlitz and his son Sven von Müller, on the other hand, are considered lost. Citation style: Barch, N 159/...

History of the Inventor: The Naval Cabinet was created in 1889, modelled on the Prussian Military Cabinet, as an office for the exercise of command in maritime affairs. It became the decisive authority in personnel matters of naval officers. On 28.10.1918 subordinated to the State Secretary of the Reichsmarineamt. Inventory description: Following the model of the Prussian Military Cabinet, the Naval Cabinet was created on April 1, 1889. Designed as an office for the exercise of command in maritime affairs, it has evolved in practice into the key personnel agency for naval officers. As an immediate authority, it was directly subordinated to the emperor, i.e. it was not subject to the responsibility of parliament. The Naval Cabinet should act as the administrative authority for the "management of maritime affairs" and for the transmission of orders to the Naval Authorities and to certain persons. However, the main task became the processing of the personal data and staffing of the naval officers, naval cadets, naval infantry officers, mechanical engineers, witness officers, fireworks officers and torpedo officers. On 28 October 1918 the authority was subordinated to the State Secretary of the Reichsmarineamt and in December 1918 it was converted into the Personalamt im Reichsmarineamt. Characterisation of the contents: The files of the naval cabinet have been relatively completely preserved. This does not rule out gaps in individual cases. For example, there are no detailed file plans or other registration aids or a business distribution plan valid at the time. As adjutant general, the chief of the naval cabinet was in the emperor's personal service. The files of his authority therefore document to a considerable extent the personal affairs of Wilhelm II and other domestic and foreign princes. They contain, among other things, hand-drawn fleet tables, drawings and ship constructions of the emperor, lecture manuscripts, texts of imperial sermons and ship services, correspondence, gift lists and newspaper cuttings with personal marginal notes to all questions of the time as well as documents about construction and maintenance of the imperial yachts, all sea and land journeys of the emperor and personal affairs of the imperial family. The largest part of the stock concerns the personnel affairs of the officers. Although the personnel files were destroyed as intended after the deaths of those affected, the existing extracts from the qualification reports in conjunction with documents on visits, farewells, personnel budgets and staffing allow an almost complete reconstruction of personnel policy in the Navy as well as the military career of individual active officers. Documents on the general organisation of the navy and military political affairs, including correspondence with the military cabinet and other military and civil authorities, as well as military reporting on general political and economic affairs are another focus of the collection. Order awards, social affairs, administration and administration of justice are also documented. State of development: Online-Findbuch Scope, Explanation: Stock without increase78,5 lfm 2573 AE Citation method: BArch, RM 2/...