guides to german records microfilmed at - Sturmpanzer.com

P R EThe Guides to German Records Microflined at Alexandria, VaVconstitute a series of finding aids describing National Archivesmicrofilm that reproduces seized records of German central, regional,and local government agencies, and of military commandsand units, as well as of the Nazi Party, its formation, affiliatedassociations, and supervised organizations. The recordsdescribed in the Guides were created generally during the periodfrom 1920 to 1945.The series was initiated by the Microfilming Project of theCommittee for the Study of War Documents of tho American HistoricalAssociation in cooperation with the National Archivesand the Department of the Army. With the termination of AHAparticipation in July 1963, the National Archives assumedsole responsibility for the reproduction of records and thepreparation of Guides.This Guide is one of many in the series describing the recordsof the German Army field commands which have been arranged byunit and filmed in discrete microcopies according to theirmilitary echelon as follows: Army Groups (Microcopy T-311),Armies (T-312), Panzer Armies (T-313), Corps (T-3H), Divisions(T-315), and Rear Areas, Occupied Territories, and Others (T-501).Guide No. 64 (designated Part IV of Guides to records of GermanArmy divisions—Farts I-III being Guides 41, 45, and 63) describesthe contents of 236 rolls of Microcopy No. T-315 reproducingrecords of divisions numbered 22 through 57. FutureGuides will describe records of divisions numbered above 57.The records in Guide 64 include material on the campaign inPoland in 1939, the western campaigns in 1940 and 1944 and 1945,the campaign against the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945, theNorth African campaign in 1942 and 1943, the campaign in Italyfrom 1943 to 1945, and occupation duty in France from 1940 to1944 and in Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Norway from 1940 toCE1943, and occupation duty and antipartisan warfare in the Balkans,from 1941 to 1945.The provenance to which each record item is attributed is theunit .headquarters that created it (i.e., kept it on file , althougha'large proportion of the items had in fact already beenretired to depositories of the Heeresarchiv Potsdam, Thereaccession numbers vero assigned and stamped or written on thecovers .in "the :.prcLer received, and the records were then cataloged; by unit in the so-called "Potsdam Catalog." 67 the timethe records reached the United States, they were in rough, arrangementby unit. The National Archives has retained thissystem inherited from its various American predecessor organizations,taking advantage of the circumstance that the originalPotsdam catalogs were acquired along with the seized field commandrecords, The AHA and National Archives also followed thisarrangement in their joint and separate microfilm projects; however,some record items were filmed out of sequence because ofsubsequent declassification or the discovery of previously mislaidor temporarily unavailable material, which accounts for theoccasional break in continuity of roll numbers in the Guides.Record items not yet retired to the Heeresarchiv depositoriesat the time.of .capture were assigned accession numbers abcve75,000 by American custodians in extension of the originalPotsdam numbering scheme.Considerable information on the fate of Germany's militaryarchives during World War II, including documentation of effortsto reconstruct records destroyed in several wartime fires, maybe found in the files of the Chef des Heeresarchivs, OKH, filmedas Microcopy T-78, Rolls 1-38 and described in Guide No. 12 ofthe series.Although the records of these divisions have been filmed selectively,the war journals (Kriegstagebiicher) and activity reportsiii