The Eastern Publications Office (PuSte Ost) was the last of the agencies established as part of the ‘Ethnic German Research Associations’ (VFG), which, organised on a territorial basis and with a strongly political agenda, dealt with issues relating to Germans living abroad.^[1] It emerged in early 1942 from the ‘Georg Leibbrandt Collection’, which – established in 1937 and affiliated with the ‘Rosenberg Office’ and later the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (RMO) – had, under the direction of Emil Meynen (1902–1994), had collected and processed demographic data on the territories of the occupied Soviet Union, particularly concerning the German minorities living there. The findings were published in a series of the same name, subtitled ‘Sources for Research into the German Community in Russia ’.^[2] Furthermore, she was entrusted with the management of the “Eastern European Research Association” (OEFG), which had also been newly founded.^[3] From 1943, it was placed under the authority of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA); at the end of 1944, it was affiliated with the ‘Wannsee Institute’ within the ‘Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS’ (SD) and was thus, like the entire VFG complex, placed under the authority of Heinrich Himmler’s (1900–1945) empire.^[4]

PuSte Ost was funded by the RMO, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (AA) and the Reich Ministry of the Interior (RMI). It was established as part of efforts by the three ministries to delineate the respective remits of the various institutions within the framework of the VFG. Two staff members of the “Sammlung Georg Leibbrandt” publication series, Margarete Woltner (1897–1985) and Karl August Fischer (1885–1975), took over the management of the OEFG. In line with the usual structure, it was now also necessary to establish a publications office. This task was entrusted to the “Georg Leibbrandt Collection” department, which from then on operated under the name “Publikationsstelle Ost”, continued to be headed by von Meynen, and originally comprised six staff members. This number was supplemented by scholarship holders from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and freelance staff, and rose to around 30 employees by early 1943.^[5] The official renaming can be dated to a decree issued by the RMO on 1 October 1942, although the previous terminology continued to be used in parallel. The institution was attached to Main Department I (Politics) within the RMO, which was headed by Georg Leibbrandt (1899–1982), the collection’s namesake and himself a Russian-German. Administrative and financial oversight was exercised jointly by the three ministries mentioned, with the following division of responsibilities: “The R.f.d.b.O. [= Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg (1892/93–1946)] bears the personnel and material administrative costs. General budgetary expenditure is apportioned amongst the three departments (R.f.d.b.O., RdI and the Foreign Office). Each department bears the expenditure attributable to the tasks it has commissioned.”^[6] The range of tasks can be divided into four areas: the archival recording and processing of existing sources relating to the Russian Germans; the editing and publication of these sources; the establishment of card indexes in which these and other holdings were recorded; and, finally, the implementation of “ethnic policy projects” (primarily the production of maps).

Georg Leibbrandt (1899–1982)
[Wikimedia Commons].

During several research trips to the Soviet Union, as well as to the USA, Georg Leibbrandt had built up an extensive private collection of documents and archival material on the Russian-German community in the second half of the 1920s and the early 1930s. This collection comprised parish and local chronicles, diaries, calendars, leaflets, brochures and memoirs, and was one of the most comprehensive collections of material on German emigration to Russia. Among the most important components in this context were “records from the emigration lists of Württemberg authorities, the archive of the Welfare Committee for Settlers in Southern Russia […] and the *Odessaer Zeitung*, which was published from 1863 to 1914”^[7]. In 1937, the collection was handed over to Emil Meynen, who, as head of the VFG’s administrative office, co-ordinated the ‘ethnic policy work’ in this area.^[8] In early 1939, a unit was established to edit the materials. The aim was, on the one hand, to “carry out a census of the Russian Germans […] and, on the other hand, to engage in ideological persuasion so that these ‘ethnic’ Germans would not fall prey to a process of assimilation.”^[9]

In the process, a great deal of ‘ethnic policy work’ of importance to the regime was carried out; this was published ‘for official use only’ and, in Meynen’s own assessment, made the collection the ‘central research centre for German identity in Eastern Europe’^[10] . These included maintaining a local index of German settlements within the territory of the Soviet Union, their cartographic documentation, and the production of a ‘map of peoples’ intended to illustrate the various nationalities of the Soviet Union. The local index was published in seven volumes under the title *Die deutschen Siedlungen in der Sowjetunion* (German Settlements in the Soviet Union). Furthermore, Ukrainian and Russian press publications were analysed and a card index of prominent figures among the Russian Germans was compiled, partly with the aim of determining their ‘ethnic stance’. In addition, a card index was established to catalogue all written material relating to the Russian-German community; by 1942, it listed over 1,000 titles. A library was also set up, which, in the course of the war, was stocked with looted material from the “Sonderkommando Künsberg”^[11], which was subordinate to the Foreign Office (AA). As the German Wehrmacht advanced following the invasion of the Soviet Union, a ‘Sonderkommando’ was also established under the leadership of Karl Stumpp (1896–1982) – another Russian German who worked full-time at the German Institute for Foreign Studies (DAI) in Stuttgart and acted as a freelance collaborator for the “Georg Leibbrandt Collection” / PuSte Ost^[12] – collected statistical data on the German population in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine; in doing so, he contributed to the registration of individuals as part of the “German People’s List”, whilst his reports also served as “chronicles of the murder of the Jewish population”^[13] .

The PuSte Ost premises in Berlin were damaged by air raids at the end of 1943, and a great deal of material was destroyed by fire. In January 1944, a partial evacuation took place of the library, which at that time comprised 30,000 volumes. By August 1944, the institution was barely functional. Prior to this, however, it had still managed to carry out a number of projects: various atlases on the occupied territories – in fierce competition with the NOFG and the Berlin-Dahlem Publications Office due to parallel work being carried out –^[14] directories of place names, overviews of the administrative structure of Ukraine, and the cataloguing of looted archive holdings. What remained of the Publications Office was integrated into the structures of the ‘Wannsee Institute’, which had been dealing with matters relating to the Soviet Union within the framework of the SD since 1936/37 and was later directly affiliated with the RSHA as ‘Office VII: Worldview and Analysis – SD Foreign Affairs’.

• Gabriele Camphausen: Academic Historical Research on Russia during the Third Reich, 1933–1945. Frankfurt am Main et al., 1990 (Europäische Hochschulschriften, Series 3: History and its Auxiliary Sciences 418), pp. 213–239.
• Michael Fahlbusch: Science in the Service of National Socialist Policy? The ‘Volksdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaften’ from 1931–1945. Baden-Baden 1999, pp. 590–622.
• Julia Landau: Publikationsstelle Ost/Georg Leibbrandt Collection. In: Michael Fahlbusch, Ingo Haar, Matthias Berg (eds.): Handbook of ‘Völkische’ Sciences. Individuals – Institutions – Research Programs – Foundations. Munich 2008, pp. 486–496.
• Mechtild Rössler: ‘Science and Living Space’. Geographical Research on the East under National Socialism. A Contribution to the History of the Discipline of Geography. Berlin, Hamburg 1990 (Hamburg Contributions to the History of Science 8), pp. 112–133.

[1] For a brief overview of the subject, see Martin Munke: “The Georg Leibbrandt Collection” and “Publikationsstelle Ost”. Demographic research in the service of National Socialism. In: Ostblicke 5 (2014).

[2] See also Julia Landau: Georg Leibbrandt Collection (publication series). In: Michael Fahlbusch, Ingo Haar, Matthias Berg (eds.): Handbook of Ethnic Sciences. Individuals – Institutions – Research Programs – Foundations. Munich 2008, pp. 611–614.

[3] Meynen was also head of the VFG’s administrative office and thus of the umbrella organisation for PuSte Ost and OEFG. Owing to the proximity in terms of personnel, tasks and premises – the ‘Georg Leibbrandt Collection’ was housed on the premises of the VFG’s administrative office – PuSte Ost is occasionally confused with the Berlin-Dahlem Publications Centre of the North-East German (later North and East German) Research Association (NOFG), which also belonged to the VFG network. See Martin Munke: Berlin-Dahlem Publications Centre. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2013. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/53902.html (22 May 2013, 15 November 2021).

[4] See Gideon Botsch: ‘Secret Eastern Research’ in the SD. On the origins and activities of the ‘Wannsee Institute’ 1935–1945. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 48 (2000), pp. 509–524, here pp. 520ff.

[5] Given this comparatively modest staffing level alone, the assertion made by Ingo Haar in: ‘German “Ostforschung” and Anti-Semitism’. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 48 (2000), pp. 485–508, here p. 504, that PuSte Ost was “the interface between the two major projects of National Socialism” – namely the “General Plan East” and the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” – to be a gross exaggeration. A similar point applies with regard to the budget, which in 1942 for the OEFG and PuSte Ost (excluding special expenditure on specific projects) stood at just over 100,000 Reichsmark (Fahlbusch: *Wissenschaft im Dienst der nationalsozialistischen Politik?*, p. 615) – a fraction of the budget running into millions available to the ‘Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle’ (Central Office for Ethnic Germans), which was subordinate to Himmler, for the implementation of the regime’s ‘ethnic policy objectives’. The “start-up funding” for the “Georg Leibbrandt Collection” provided by the RMI had amounted to 2,750 Reichsmark (Camphausen: Die wissenschaftliche historische Russlandforschung, p. 215).

[6] Federal Archives, Berlin-Lichterfelde (hereinafter BArch), fonds R2/11909 (Reich Ministry of Finance), LG 9400 Ost – 318 I A, 17 July 1943.

[7] Landau: Publications Office East/Georg Leibbrandt Collection, here pp. 490ff. For a detailed inventory, see BArch, Collection R153/1233 (Berlin-Dahlem Publications Office), brochure ‘Georg Leibbrandt’s Collection’.

[8] Meynen was one of the leading geographers and spatial planners in the Federal Republic of Germany. Among other things, he contributed to the “Documentation of the Expulsion of Germans from Eastern Central Europe”, led by Theodor Schieder (1908–1984). See, for further insight, Mathias Beer: ‘Between Politics and Contemporary History: The Major Research Project “Documentation of the Expulsion of Germans from East-Central Europe”’. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 46 (1998), pp. 345–389.

[9] Fahlbusch: ‘Science in the Service of National Socialist Politics?’, p. 602.

[10] Emil Meynen: ‘The Georg Leibbrandt Collection’. In: Georg Leibbrandt (ed.): Probleme des Ostraumes. Berlin 1942 (Bücherei des Ostraumens, special publication), pp. 111–118, here p. 113.

[11] For further details, see Ulrike Hartung: Raids in the Soviet Union. The Künsberg Special Command 1941–1943. Bremen 1997; Anja Heuß: The ‘Loot Organisation’ of the Foreign Office. The Künsberg Special Command and the Looting of Cultural Property in the Soviet Union. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 45 (1997), pp. 535–556.

[12] In the Federal Republic of Germany, Stumpp was a secondary school teacher in Tübingen and long-standing chairman of the ‘Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland’ (Association of Germans from Russia). His publications on the Russian Germans were cited largely uncritically for a long time (in some cases to this day). See, for example, Karl Stumpp: Emigration from Germany to Russia in the Years 1763 to 1862. 4th ed. Stuttgart 1984.

[13] Landau: Publikationsstelle Ost/Georg Leibbrandt Collection, p. 492. See also Eric J. Schmaltz and Samuel D. Sinner: ‘The Nazi Ethnographic Research of Georg Leibbrandt and Karl Stumpp in Ukraine, and Its North American Legacy’. In: *Holocaust and Genocide Studies* 14 (2000), pp. 28–64. Reprinted in: Michael Fahlbusch, Ingo Haar (eds.): *German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing. 1919–1945*. New York, Oxford 2005, pp. 51–85; Ingeborg Fleischhauer: The Third Reich and the Germans in the Soviet Union. Stuttgart 1983 (Series of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 46), passim.

[14] See Camphausen: Academic Historical Research on Russia, pp. 227–231.

Martin Munke: Publikationsstelle Ost. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2013. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/62681.html (accessed 15 November 2021).