Fonds Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Abt. Staatsarchiv Freiburg, T 1 (Zugang 1975/0001) - Estate Blankenhorn, Erich

1-68, 74-89

Biographical outline: <br /> Erich Blankenhorn was born in Karlsruhe on 14 March 1878 as the son of the oenologist, owner of the Blankenhornsberg vineyard and chairman of the German Winegrowing Association Adolph Blankenhorn (1843-1906). After attending grammar school, he began his officer's career with the Leibdragoner Regiment in 1896. In the course of his military career, he was assigned to various staffs, including the 3rd Baden Dragoner Regiment Prince Charles No. 22. At the end of the war, he was Major and Chief of the General Staff of the Landeskommandanten Baden in Karlsruhe.After the demobilisation of the army and the establishment of a demilitarised zone in Baden, the Baden State Ministry commissioned him to set up a barracks security police force in the country. Within a short space of time, Blankenhorn, who had been promoted to Colonel and Chief of the Baden Police, had set up hundreds of men in many of Baden's cities, initially totalling 2,200. In this capacity he was directly subordinated to the police department of the Ministry of the Interior. In the troubled early years of the Weimar Republic and the Free State of Baden, these military units, which were mainly recruited from dismissed soldiers, played a particularly important role, as did Blankenhorn's day-to-day business in the service and training of police officers, in particular the sport of the police, to which he assigned considerable importance for the effectiveness and efficiency of the police units. Under his explicit support, a number of police sports clubs and the Badischer Polizeisportverband (Baden Police Sports Association) were founded and he became its chairman. He committed himself to the new form of government and was regarded as a loyal servant of democracy. In March 1933 he tried to stop the hoisting of NS flags on Karlsruhe service buildings. In April of that year he was put into temporary retirement and finally retired in July 1933. It was thanks to his initiative that a collection of military history records was compiled in Karlsruhe, which he supervised on a voluntary basis, scientifically arranged and processed. In May 1934 this collection was opened as the Baden Army Museum in the former stables of Karlsruhe Castle. Erich Blankenhorn remained his honorary director and after the end of the war he brought the outsourced exhibits together in the New Castle Baden-Baden. The "Badische Historische Museum" was opened there in 1949, but was moved to Rastatt Castle in 1956. Erich Blankenhorn died on 15 January 1963 in Badenweiler.<br /> <br /> Inventory history: <br /> The documents left behind by Erich Blankenhorn unite both documents from his official activity and from activities which have arisen in direct connection with his official activity. According to his own statements, the documents were "continuously collected in the office of my office from 1919 to 1933"; according to their character they are hand-files. After his dismissal from service, Blankenhorn took this collection with him, thus escaping the purges of the "new masters". This increases the value of the tradition, which has a special value as an essential source not only for the organisational history of the Baden police between 1919 and 1933, but also for other social areas, above all the police sport and the sports movement in the Weimar Republic in general, almost a unique selling point. Blankenhorn himself was president of the Badischer Polizeisportverband for many years. Blankenhorn, too, was aware of the value of his tradition and based the only map of his collection on the fact that it had escaped the file cleansing after 1933: "The fact that the police colonel was in possession of police files was probably not unknown to the authorities. The files were researched. In June 1956, Blankenhorn handed over the collection he had saved during the war to the director of the state police, Dr. Schäfer, in Freiburg "to faithful hands", who handed over the documents to the Landspolizeischule Baden-Württemberg in Freiburg. It was not until the beginning of the 1970s that the Freiburg State Archives became aware of the existence of this estate, which, after lengthy negotiations with the Landespolizeischule and the Blankenhorn family, was finally transferred to the Freiburg State Archives in 1975. The archive's efforts to simultaneously take over the estate of its son Herbert Blankenhorn (1904-1991), Adenauer's personal adviser in 1949, head of the political department of the Federal Foreign Office in 1951, then ambassador to Paris and London, failed, however. This is now in the Federal Archives.<br /> <br /> History of indexing: <br /> The estate, consisting largely of serial files, had already been roughly indexed by Blankenhorn in the form of an archive list. The attempt to develop the content of the series files, however, remained stuck after the hopeful beginning of the second series file. This was an unsatisfactory state of affairs, especially in the case of an estate that was frequently requested and used. In particular, the photos depicting the everyday life of the Baden police but also the political and social reality of the Weimar Republic (including photos of the funeral of the Reich President Friedrich Ebert, 1925, in Heidelberg) were largely unfit for targeted use, and the estate was therefore redrawn by Kurt Hochstuhl in 2010, the photos digitized by Ewald Krüger-Vaz and - as far as possible - made accessible, so that both components can now be presented online on the Internet. Erich Blankenhorn's "Handaktennachlass" (hand file estate) undoubtedly gains its special value through the numerous documents on sport in the Weimar Republic (invitations to sporting events, programmes, lists of results, etc.), which extend far beyond the borders of Baden. The newsletter of the Badischer Polzei-Sport-Verband, which he left behind, is, apart from an edition in the Leipzig University Library, the only documented complete edition of the association's organ. 89 order numbers (with blank numbers), including file numbers and photo order numbers with 1855 digital data in a total volume of 3 linear metres; it is not subject to any restrictions on use.Freiburg, September 2010Kurt Hochstuhl

Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Abt. Staatsarchiv Freiburg (Archivtektonik) >> Nachlässe und Familienarchive >> Nachlässe

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Original description: Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek

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