Since April 2000, the diverse tasks being uniformly performed till then by the Central Office are shared by the Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv) and the Central Office.
Based on an administrative agreement between the Lands, which are responsible for the Central Office and the Federal Republic of Germany, particularly the closed criminal investigation proceedings of the Central Office have been largely transferred to the Federal Archive, unless they are permanently required for the ongoing work. However, the Central Office is at any time entitled to use overridingly the entire archive holdings transferred to the Federal Archive.
For this reason, the
Federal Archive has established its local branch office in the same building in Ludwigsburg. Since then, the Central Office has focused
primarily on its original juristic tasks such as conducting preliminary investigation of Nazi crimes and in this context to collect,
to scrutinise
and to evaluate relevant
material in Germany and abroad.
Outside of the ongoing criminal investigations, the Federal Archive is obliged to provide information from the archive and to support visitors, especially researchers, and other visitors who want to get access to the transferred proceedings. The Federal Archive Act (Bundesarchivgesetz) is authoritative in this respect, according to which the terms of protection shall be shortened for scientific researches or if reasonable private needs are provided (see Section 5 of the Federal Archive Act for more detail). The tasks of the branch office in Ludwigsburg include in detail the safeguarding of the archival documents of approximately 800 running meters of files by the appropriate storage and restoration works, their electronic indexing, the advisory and supporting services for archive users as well as the educational work with classes and seminars for teachers to develop professional skills.
You can contact the branch office of the Federal Archive in Ludwigsburg by phone +49 7141 / 89 92 83 (fax +49 7141 / 89 91 12) or by sending an email to ludwigsburg@bundesarchiv.de or a letter to the same address as of the Central Office.
