Air Technical Index documents

[ArtieBob]

Ouidjat's post leads me to discuss a bit about the role of the Paris clearing house for captured German documents. In
1945, much (but not all) of the material collected by the western allies was sent to a location in Paris. The allied
intelligence gathering effort involved thousands of allied and they gathered a very large quantity of material. In
Paris, this material was apparently indexed and reviewed by many interested allied organizations, including USSBS, RAF,
US Navy, USAAF, the war crimes commission and possilby more. As noted above, all of the documents on the ADI(k) were
microfilmed in Paris, by US Navy intelligence.Included on these films are some of that collection's index sheets which
identify groups of documents and their allied destinations, unfortunately not complete. My question to Ouidjat, does
he know if the "residue" of the Paris documents survived, i.e. captured documents that were not claimed or distributed
to other organizations. Also are there any indications that this material made it into French archives, particularly the
indexes, as they would give a map where to search for document groups that otherwise may have been overlooked.

Best Regards

Artie Bob

I appreciate all of the replies. These are providing me a lot of good sources to check, though for the moment I'm trying to avoid foreign sources until I'm sure I've exhausted all domestic ones.

Thanks for the interesting info about the Paris clearinghouse for the captured documents, Artie Bob! I wasn't aware of the logistics of it. I'm starting to think now that perhaps the documents I'm looking for could be England or France (or for that matter Germany) depending on how they could have been divvied up.

On a similar note, I should add that I've seen a lot of references to a large collection of captured documents in the UK. For example, consider this bibliography of the works by Dietrich Küchemann, famous German aerodynamics expert:

https://apps.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA044591

Most of the German documents here are listed with GDC numbers. GDC stands for German Document Centre. This appears to be where the UK organized their captured document collection. For all I know a lot of the documents I'm looking for ended up there, but I have no idea how to check that. I haven't found any indices like the US's desk catalog for that collection.

[edwest2]

Microfilming of documents began during and right after the war and continued till 1947. Millions of pages were photographed and tons of actual documents were removed. German historians and the Deutsches Museum were in talks with the Americans for decades regarding captured documents. Some were released and it appeared that others were held back due to their classification level. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Deutsches Museum began receiving some documents but again, some were held back until the end of the 1990s. An example: A highly classified report prepared by the Army Security Agency was not declassified until 2009.

[Steve Coates]

HypersonicAero wrote;

Most of the German documents here are listed with GDC numbers. GDC stands for German Document Centre. This appears to be where the UK organized their captured document collection. For all I know a lot of the documents I'm looking for ended up there, but I have no idea how to check that. I haven't found any indices like the US's desk catalog for that collection.

The GDC material is all held in the Imperial War Museum's repository at Duxford. The holdings are catalogued in a series of index cards. There is no online search facility so there's no real alternative but to visit. I am attaching a very basic note I've written up on the GDC holdings. You're welcome to ask additional questions.

[Steve Coates]

A very useful German archive to search, not least because the archivist, Jessika Wichner has done an excellent job of getting a searchable database in place is the DLR Archiv: https://dlr-archivkatalog.bsz-bw.de/

Hi Steve! The DLR archive is great. It has tons of citation information. I've even tracked down some English translations from it, which I didn't expect at all.

Speaking of translations, does the GDC collection contain both German documents and English translations? I have some MAP-VG translations where I haven't been able to find the original document, to the point where I kinda wonder whether it even exists. The original might have just ended up in this collection, for all I know.