Looking for abstracts to von Rohden collection at NARS in the 1960's

[Larry deZeng]

Hi Rod,

I guess that's one of the great mysteries surrounding all of the Luftwaffe documents that were sent to the U.S. after the war for use by postwar study groups and then microfilming.

All I can do is speculate because there a number of possibilities. It seems that they were last in the possession of the Army Historical Office which, after several moves, ended up in the former Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue in Washington by the mid-1970's. This office was busy writing multi-volume histories of the U.S. Army, had a large staff of historians and university professors, and had the power and authority to seize whatever World War II documents it wanted to undertake its mission. Unfortunately, not everything that passed into its hands got returned to its proper venue. For example, I know for a fact that large amounts of documentation from the war in the Pacific ended up in its hands and was then "lost". Many years later, some of this material was found at NARA stored in unrelated boxes in the Army Historical Office record group instead of having been returned to the record group where it belonged. Hence, for years no one could find these documents.

So that's my guess on where the missing reels might have ended up. As you know, researchers have often said that the main difference between the U.S. NARA and the British PRO is quantity and cataloguing. The Brits heavily purged their WWII records but know exactly where every document is, while the Americans saved every last scrap of paper and don't don't know where anything is. It appears that this is the case here.

L.