ASTRID M. Eckert. The Struggle for the Files

The total defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II resulted in the loss of German sovereignty, the utter devastation of the nation's civilian, military, and industrial infrastructure, and the partial destruction or capture of its written official records. In her captivating book, Astrid M. Eckert details the odyssey of the German archives after 1945 from their seizure by the victorious armies to their piecemeal, still incomplete return to Germany in the decades since. Focusing on the United States and Great Britain, Eckert reconstructs from more than a dozen archives in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States the struggle for thousands of tons of captured German documents originating from various branches of the Nazi state, its party apparatus, government agencies, organizations, industries, and the military. Eckert states at the outset that her book is not concerned with the content of the files but with the disputes over their location, transport, and archival accommodation and access. It speaks to her vivid and detail-laden narrative that this limitation is at times hard to accept, for she offers a kind of backstory to some of the most important document collections and historiographical works on twentieth-century German history. Her book thus not only investigates a hitherto unknown aspect of the attempts at explaining and understanding the Nazi past made by Germans and the Allies; it also adds an important chapter to the history of West German reconstruction, of its relations with the Western allies, and of archives in general.

Archaeology · Economic history · German · Historiography · Nazism · Political science · State (computer science) · World War II · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies