The State Archives of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Federal Ministry of Finance have signed an agreement on the financing of a three-part project to digitize, describe and put online Wiedergutmachung records of the State Archives’ Rhineland Department. The project will run for around three and a half years.
21.10.2024
State Archives of North Rhine-Westphalia: Kick-off for project on digitization and description of Wiedergutmachung records
The project focuses on the in-depth description and digitization of Wiedergutmachung records from North Rhine-Westphalia. The records cover both “famous cases” such as that of the former mayor of Aachen Wilhelm Rombach (1884-1974), whom the National Socialists removed from office, as well as persecuted victims such as the Levano family of Aachen who did not receive any public attention. | Landesarchiv NRW Abteilung Rheinland
Aside from assessing the specific administrative and legal conditions of the North Rhine-Westphalian Wiedergutmachung policy, the first sub-project plans to collect and register all relevant documents on Wiedergutmachung in a thematic inventory in cooperation with other regional archives, institutions and researchers.
In the second sub-project, the State Archives intend to digitize the complete Wiedergutmachung holding BR 3007 (Aachen district government), followed by an in-depth description of the holding by use of the metadata standard developed by a working group of the KLA (Conference of Heads of the Federal and State Archives Administrations). Eventually, the data and the digitized records will be available for public access inside the Online Collection Wiedergutmachung.
The third sub-project aims at recording the most important undescribed Wiedergutmachung holdings (BR 3001 and BR 3002 – compensation and compensation pension records of the district governments of Aachen, Düsseldorf and Cologne and of the North Rhine-Westphalian Land Pension Authority). This step is a necessary preparatory measure for the subsequent digitization and in-depth description of the records to present them in the Online Collection Wiedergutmachung. Holding BR 3001 includes all compensation applications from supra-regional persecuted groups of victims pursuant to Article V of the Final Federal Compensation Act. Holding BR 3002 contains records of applicants entitled to compensation pursuant to §§ 150 and 160 of the Federal Compensation Act, meaning persecuted persons from former expulsion areas, persecuted stateless persons and refugees within the meaning of the Geneva Convention. The project makes these extensive and highly significant holdings accessible for the first time.