The history of the city archive

It was not until 1934 that the city archive was established. With Theodor Reichert, the city of Offenbach am Main had its first city archivist, who was also the director of the local history museum. The archive was allocated and furnished rooms in Isenburg Castle, which had recently been vacated by the municipal library:

By September 1937, Reichert had made so much progress that the city archive could also be used by interested parties: 20,000 (file) volumes, 662 volumes of the archive library and a collection of 300 photo plates documenting Offenbach's cityscape were available. Theodor Reichert was the driving force behind the founding of the city archive, which he finally succeeded in doing with reference to the National Socialist cultural policy ("Volkstum und Heimat" as a main motive). In the course of her research study "Offenbach. Kultur im Sog des Nationalsozialismus" (2019), Andrea Hansert also took a look at the circumstances surrounding the founding of the city archive and the person of Theodor Reichert(ibid., p. 125ff).

During the Second World War, however, a severe cutback followed. The war losses are difficult to quantify, but are likely to have been considerable despite the removal to Upper Hesse. In addition, the wartime destruction of a large number of municipal buildings - and thus the current registries - also left large gaps in the records of the interwar period as a whole and the National Socialist period in particular.

In 1947, the city archive was finally able to be housed with the returned documents in Sandstraße 26, the former loan house of the city of Offenbach built in 1903, after Isenburg Castle had been destroyed. During the reconstruction period, the city archive was looked after by Georg Hoffmann and later by Werner Münzberg, who, in addition to the city archive, also managed the city museum, which was re-established in 1971.

In 1980, the town archive and museum were separated organizationally, and in 1989 the town archive was able to move from its cramped premises in Sandgasse to its current location in the Bernardbau at Herrnstraße 61. Finally, the circle was closed again to a certain extent when the City Archive and City Museum were merged in 2004 to form the "House of City History" in its current form and the City Museum moved from Dreieich Park to the City Archive in the Bernardbau.

Only a few documents in the town archive date back to the Isenburg period before 1815, such as the "Offenbacher Gerichtsbuch" (1587-1720), which is very prominent; there are also some mortgage books and documents relating to the war cost accounts of the French Revolutionary Wars. A denser municipal tradition can only be found from the mid-1820s, when Offenbach's old and new municipalities were merged and municipal self-government was established in the Grand Duchy of Hesse and thus also in Offenbach. For the pre-Hessian period, the relevant records can be found in the Princely Isenburg Archives in Birstein, the sovereigns of the time. Many documents relating to Offenbach from the princely archives are available on microfilm, and finding aids for the Isenburg holdings can also be used in the town archive.