Information on data processing: Files of the Reich Independent Regional Administration – Upper Austria

Terms of reference

The file series Gauselbstverwaltung (“Reich independent regional administration”) of the Archives of Upper Austria primarily contains records regarding seizures of monasteries and abbeys in Upper Austria, as well as records pertaining to possessions of the Schwarzenberg Family.
Aside from these records, the file series also contains other “aryanization” and confiscation proceedings which have been of great importance to the General Settlement Fund in the course of its investigations on seized properties.

Digitization

The records of the files series “Reich independent regional administration” at the Archives of Upper Austria (abbreviated: GSV) were obtained from the access database “Aryanizations”, compiled by the provincial government of Upper Austria on 17 October 2002. This “aryanization-database” is divided into three sections: BVVR (“Confiscated assets, restitution of assets”), RK Linz (“Restitution Commission Linz”) and RSTG (“Restitutions”). The BVVR section containing the five following file series: FLD – BV (“Financial Directorate – Confiscated assets”), ARIS (“aryanizations”, GSV, FLD - VR (“Financial Directorate – Restitution of assets”) and FiRK (“Restitution Commission of the Financial Department of the Province of Upper Austria”), has been entered into an excel spreadsheet for further processing. These files consisting of a total number of 1,763 records constitute the “aryanization files” of the Archives of Upper Austria.

Processing the digitized data

In the excel spreadsheet, under the BVVR section, 34 records can be found under the title “Reich independent regional administration” (GSV). These records have been entered in several stages and adapted according to the requirements of the Findbuch. Both natural and legal persons have been recorded in separate columns in order to distinguish them from one another. In addition, if more than one natural person was entered in each line, they were each given their own line in the columns for either the legal and/or natural person as appropriate. Due to this division the total number of the file series “Reich independent regional administration” increased from a total of 34 to a total of 43 records.

In a further step, data on the aggrieved person was either assigned to the legal and/or natural person accordingly and spellings standardized. Moreover the following columns were added: type of file, holdings, file number, signature, archive and data source.

The entire data holdings were edited and standardized using the following criteria: spelling mistakes were corrected and spelling standardized. Abbreviated place names were written out in full. To facilitate geographical location, Austrian residential addresses were supplemented with a district and province and international addresses with a country.
The formal processing standards developed were also applied.

The records in the excel worksheet were processed for the Findbuch between October and December 2011.

The file series are stored in 34 boxes in which the names (of natural and legal person) are listed in alphabetical order. It is necessary to state both the holdings “Reich independent regional administration” and the box number when submitting orders to the Archives of Upper Austria.