History of the Inventory Designer: Based on a secret memorandum by Adolf Hitler from the summer of 1936 (handed down in R 3/1501), the new four-year plan was officially announced at the Reich Party Congress in September 1936. The Prussian Prime Minister Hermann Göring (RGBl. I 1936, p. 887) was appointed as the commissioner for the four-year plan on 18 October 1936; the Prussian State Ministry under Hermann Göring (office of the State Secretary Körner) acted as the central office. He was given the authority to centrally control all economic measures, in particular war economic measures, including the power to issue instructions to the Reich ministries and all levels of the party. The task of the (second) four-year plan was to focus the German economy on armament and war production and to reduce dependence on foreign imports (self-sufficiency efforts), above all in the raw materials and food sectors, in order to achieve the goals set by Hitler ("1. The German army must be operational in four years. 2. the German economy must be war-capable in four years"). The most important measures were, on the one hand, the quota system for important raw materials and their partly synthetic production in the Reich, and, on the other hand, the planning and control of labour input as well as the stabilization of wages and prices in order to channel investment into the capital goods industry and restrict private consumption. To carry out the tasks, numerous special representatives were appointed and various special authorities created, including for the economic exploitation of the occupied and annexed territories. In 1940, the four-year plan was extended by a further four years with the proviso that it was adapted to the needs of the war (RGBl. I 1940, p. 1395). From 1942, however, more and more powers were transferred to the Reich Minister for Armament and Ammunition (later for Armament and War Production). Inventory description: The four-year plan announced by Hitler in 1936 aimed to enable Germany to wage war economically and militarily within four years. The Prussian Prime Minister Hermann Göring, who was entrusted with this task, was given far-reaching powers in the economic and defence sectors, especially in the supply of raw materials. Inventory history: The registry of both the headquarters of the Commissioner for the Four-Year Plan and of the numerous subordinate institutions must be regarded as almost completely lost as a result of the war events. Only a few fragments of the tradition have survived. The greater part of it is in the special archive in Moscow (fund no. 700, 337 file units), while the smaller part is in the two central German archives in East and West. The Koblenz Federal Archives kept 55 files, which today bear the signatures no. 1-52 and originate from various acquisitions; among other things, some documents were transferred to the archive in 1964 by Salzgitter AG (today's signatures no. 29-39), others were copied from the Imperial War Museum in London in 1974 (today's signatures no. 40-41, 44). The Central State Archives of the GDR in Potsdam kept another 71 files of the Commissioner for the Four-Year Plan under the inventory signature 34.01, which begin today with the signature 101; this part contained almost 40 volumes of the Press Office in the Prussian State Ministry, which was also responsible for the Four-Year Plan, as well as seven files of the Research Centre for Defense Economics. The signature no. 177, which also contains documents of the press office, also originates from the dissolution of the so-called NS archive of the HA IX/11 of the Ministry for State Security of the GDR. Archival processing: After the unification of the two German states in 1990, the two parts of the tradition were brought together in the Federal Archives in Berlin under the inventory designation R 26 I, but without initially being subjected to a common system. In 2014, the indexing information from the 1960s was transferred to the database of the Federal Archives, the indexing was revised and a task-related structure was drawn up for the entire holdings. Characterisation of the contents: The few records of the headquarters of the Commissioner for the Four-Year Plan handed down in the Federal Archives contain only a few volumes of the Central Secretariat of Göring (mainly correspondence A-Z) and the office of the State Secretary Körner as well as various preliminary files on the tasks of the Four-Year Plan (files of the Commissioner of the Führer and Reich Chancellor for Economic Affairs Wilhelm Keppler). There are also some files on the supply of raw materials and on general (including foreign) economic issues, as well as the somewhat more extensive press office documents on the press and public relations work of the four-year plan authority. State of development: Findbuch (2014) Citation method: BArch, R 26-I/...
