![\"The](\"http:\/\/www.papaworx.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/Gatermann.gif\" "\\"Gatermann")
<\/a><\/dt>\nBut in April 1933, less than 3 months after the Nazis coming to power, the Reichstag passed a law that\u00a0made Aryan ancestry\u00a0a prerequisite for a public service job. As part of its implementation, an office was created to pronounce authoritatively who was and who was not an Aryan ((Schulle, Diana. Das Reichssippenamt : eine Institution nationalsozialistischer Rassenpolitik. Berlin\u00a0: Logos Verlag Berlin (2001), 2001. ISBN 3-89722-672-3)). To assist in this endeavour, 19th century Jewish civil records were systematically collected from synagogues, municipalities and archives and brought to Berlin.<\/p>\n
The Nazi agency in charge of this process successively changed its name from “Expert for Racial Research” to “State Agency for Kinship Research” to finally “State Kinship\u00a0Office” or “RSA”. Early in 1945, when the\u00a0end of the ‘Thousand Year Reich’ was in sight, the documents were moved to Schloss Rathsfeld in Thuringia, and the Gatermann company from Duisburg was charged with the task of microfilming the complete cache of documents. A previous attempt\u00a0at copying the films was already made in 1940, while still in Berlin ((Jude R. Die j\u00fcdischen Personenstandsunterlagen in der Deutschen Zentralstelle f\u00fcr Genealogie in Leipzig. Genealogie vol 1-2\/1998: 4 – 18 and vol 3-4\/1998: 106 -120)).<\/p>\n
But now, things start to become nebulous. Somehow, the films disappeared from Schloss Rathsfeld during spring of 1945, to magically reappear 1948 in the hands of the Gatermann company,\u00a0which sold the films to the German authorities at a State and Federal level. These documents were distributed further to regional archives. A complete set of documents, in the form of\u00a0small paper contact copies, were given to the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP) in Jerusalem in 1954. LDS reports that they\u00a0filmed their copies in\u00a0the respective\u00a0state archives.<\/p>\n
The two remaining questions are: what happened to the the original documents at the end of the war and how did the films end up again\u00a0in the hands of the Gatermann company in 1948? Most experts assume that the original documents got lost during the final Russian assault. They might have drowned in a flood or they might have been taken back to Russia,\u00a0hidden away\u00a0in some arcane archives.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At least two possible scenarios are considered for the fate of the films between 1945 and 1948. The more plausible is that they had been stashed away by the Gaterman company all along until the political climate allowed recouping the investment. The other theory, purported by LDS, claims that the films got into the hands of the US occupational forces, who generously restored them to the Gatermann company.<\/p>\n
Maybe the answers to these mysteries lie hidden away in some\u00a0Wahington and Moscow archives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How the 19th century, German Jewish civil registers found their way into various of today’s archives. Continue reading