Lists of all persons of United Nations and other foreigners, German Jews and stateless persons; American Zone; Bavaria, Hesse (1)

Scope and content

Concerned here, in its basic structure, is the stock of documents, which the Zonal Tracing Bureau of the American Zone, Ludwigsburg (later ITS US Zone Division, Esslingen), had compiled from the an-swers of German communal authorities of Bavaria and Hesse, based on the implementation of the above-mentioned Order there .

The documents of this stock, in the ITS-usage also called “Formblatt-listen” (form lists), are filed in the following hierarchical sorting order:

- Federal State (“Land”) (Bavaria: Folders 1 – 1807; Hesse: Fold-ers 1808 – 2394),
- Name of the rural district or of the town being a district of its own (also called urban district) that had forwarded the compi-lation or that is referred to in the document; if the rural and urban district have the same name, the records of the rural dis-trict will be filed before those of the town,
- Nationality of the persons mentioned in the document according to a numerical code for the nationality ,
- Form type or content-related classification of the document ,
- Name of the issuing community or another institution.

After the transfer of the stock from the then branch office Esslingen to Arolsen, the ITS made the following changes within the stock:

- Between the end of the 1950ies and the 1980ies – exact dates are not known at the moment, all registry office certificates and comparable records, which were available to a greater extent, were sorted out within the scope of several operations. As far as death certificates and death notices relating to prisoners of concentration camps or their outlying commandos were concerned, they were taken over into the stocks of Group 1.1 (1.1.x.1 “List material” or 1.1.x.2-4 “Envelopes”). Death certificates relating to inmates of prisons, penitentiaries and POW-camps were transferred into the collection 1.2.2.1 Group P.P. All other certificates have presumably been collected separate-ly as of the beginning of the 1980ies and are included in the collection 2.2.2.2 today.
- In the years 1982/83, documents of the type “Form J” or “Form 10”, where inmates of prisons and penitentiaries are recorded, were sorted out and taken over into the collection 1.2.2.1 Group P.P. .
- Approximately at the same time, records of various form types about former prisoners of concentration camps were removed and added to the stock 1.1.47.1 “Various camps”.
- Documents, where also children (year of birth as from 1927) are recorded, were sorted out during this period of time, too, and passed on to the Section Child-Tracing Service. In the digi-tal archives, they are at disposal as a separate stock (2.1.1.3 / see further below). This operation of sorting out documents has not been carried out completely and consistently either. For example, both stocks still include documents today, listing children as well as older persons (years of birth 1926 and earli-er).
- Between 1960 and 1994, the ITS integrated some not very extensive document additions into this stock in accordance with the sorting criteria. A reason why these documents have been added to this stock and why not the stock 2.1.1.2, otherwise used for the incorporation of additions to the material, has been chosen is not recognizable. However, these document units are easily discernible in the digital archives on the basis of the inventory descriptions linked to the documents.
- Finally, the stock also includes some documents, which are identical with, or at least of the same contents as documents that the ITS had still acquired under the UNRRA-file number “F 18” between 1947 and 1950. It is not known at the moment when and by whom these documents had been added to the stock.
The digitised documents of this stock were taken over into the digital archives in the structure and sorting order of the paper documents. Folder numbers and – apart from possible mistakes during the digiti-sation – also the page numbers are completely corresponding to the respective labelling of the actual folders and pages. However, all indi-cated numbers have been padded with leading zeros (four digits) here.
On the basis of available records, it has been possible for the most part to automatically allocate values for the “Location information” (i.e. for “Country”, “Federal State/Province ” and “District”) as well as for the “Persons’ nationality” to the electronic documents as attributes. It has, however, not been feasible this way to set the attrib-ute “List type”, urgently required due to the size of the stock for a name research based on reference cards of the Central Name Index or on other information . A manual post-attributing in this respect, also including a registration of the attribute “City/municipality” within the “Location information”, was started early, but the conclusive processing of the stock will still take some time.
Inventory records regarding the entire stock are not on hand. Only the already mentioned document additions are registered and allo-cated to the respective digital documents in the digital archives. The relevant entries from the “F 18”-inventory register , which had been recorded later, were allocated to this stock in general, but not to the individual documents. Instead of this, suitable references to the location of the documents with the indication of folder and page numbers have been entered into the description text.
In respect of this stock the finding aid “Central Name Index” shows historically caused gaps, which may not be quantified exactly, but which are certainly of a considerable extent:

- After quite a few difficulties in the implementation of the “Allied Order”, the German authorities in Bavaria and Hesse com-plained that many original documents, which they had sent to the ITS within the scope of this operation, but which they needed for completing the forms, were still in the hands of the ITS. That is why, in July 1948, it was agreed that these original documents would be returned to the German side, and the Germans would, in turn, place the registration results at the disposal of the ITS US Zone Division also in the form of name cards according to a prescribed pattern . These name cards, also called “Suchstellenkarten” (searching place cards) or “Bayern/Hessen-Karteikarten” (Bavaria/Hesse-Index Cards), had thus been drawn up before or rather parallel to the formation of the stock. For this reason, it was not possible to directly specify the filing places in them as references to the places where to find the documents, but only certain content-related details (district or issuing authority as code of the so-called “Suchstelle”/ searching place, the classification of the docu-ment as well as the recorded nationalities) .