Das Parteiarchivwesen der NSDAP : Rekonstruktionsversuch des Gauarchivs der NSDAP-Wien

National socialism has been known to have had a very ambivalent relationship towards history. On the one hand, in an attempt to legitimate the NS regime, many parallels were drawn with German History, whereas on the other, certain anti-history trends would try to label this revolutionary movement as a radical, groundbreaking restart. As a result, certain historical events were either rewritten or mystified or even completely ignored, when assimilated into the new official version of German History. The archives of the NSDAP played a crucial role in this scenario. Aside from gathering and safeguarding all the sources of the party historiography, they also presented these to the public in various exhibitions. In its subsidiary role to the regime, it thus largely contributed to the Nazi propaganda campaign. The main NSDAP archive in Munich, and the 43 district archives, compiled all the information deemed relevant in close cooperation with the local population and the Gestapo. Apart from these differences, however, each and every one of these district archives strived to meet the same goal: to try to put its history, as perceived by its population as a whole, in an emotionally coated context, to interpret it according to its own guidelines and to present the result back to the population. This is why the documents and records that remain of these archives in this era give us a valuable insight into the self-conception and self-legitimating of the NSDAP (Universität Wien). Proefschrift Universität Wien. 245 p. ; xx cm