Reports
The facts and figures following comprise the business year 01 January to 31 December 2009
(Source: Yearbook 2010)
Visitors
The museum and archive was visited by 13 groups of maritime interest. Unfortunately, reunions of entire former U-boat crews do not happen any longer due to their physical condition, respectively the number of crewmember still alive. Therefore, visits of former U-boat men listed in our statistics are individual visits only. Among the visiting groups mentioned above there was one from Spain and another one from Japan.
317 individuals came to the archive for research purposes. Another 376 interested people came after prior appointment, to see the facilities and receive expert advice as requested before. Altogether, some 693 visitors came. The analysis of the number of visitors indicates an encouraging increase of domestic authors (19) and historians (14).
On 17 February 2009, a team for the project “Maritime Environment” produced a film about the work of the U-boat Archive, which was presented later at the Cuxhaven Fishery Museum and shown on TV Bremerhaven. On 27 October 2009, another TV team came, this time from Spain to shoot pictures in the museum and archive in support of a movie about the war at sea in WW II off the Spanish peninsula.
Correspondence
Some 1,010 letters were written in the business year 2009. In total, 612 requests for information came in, 338 domestic and further 274 from overseas. The overall correspondence and the shipment of orders for photographs (see para “Orders for Photographs” below) are included in the above numbers.
The 274 requests for information from overseas came from 23 countries
|
England |
49 |
Italy |
11 |
Japan |
4 |
|
USA |
36 |
Poland |
10 |
Tchech Republic |
4 |
|
Austria |
24 |
Finland |
9 |
Australia |
4 |
|
Switzerland |
20 |
France |
9 |
Belgium |
3 |
|
Sweden |
16 |
Norway |
8 |
Brasil |
2 |
|
Canada |
15 |
Spain |
8 |
Turkey |
2 |
|
Netherlands |
13 |
Denmark |
7 |
China |
2 |
|
Iceland |
12 |
Russia |
6 |
Total |
274 |
Library
Our specialized library increased by another 352 books. The archiving of those books was carried out as usual by our librarian and manager of the electronic library, Thomas Klemm. 92 % of those 352 books are gifts from residues (see also under literature).
Photo-Archive
In the last business year 6,987 new photographs were added to our photo-archive, whose total number of photographs has now increased to 165,062 pictures. The increase demonstrates, that the majority of photographs so far hidden in residues (see annual report for 2008) has been “activated”, i.e. has been incorporated in a way easy to be called up from electronic data banks. This work has been carried out by our archivist and treasurer, Torsten Schwenk.
Orders for Photographs
There were 48 orders for a total of 1,221 photographs, 32 orders of those for 688 photographs were domestic, and 16 orders of those for 533 photographs came from overseas. In most cases the customers received their photographs ordered in digital form, i.e. written on CDs. This improves the quality of photographs for printing purposes and the user can determine the pictures´ format himself.
Other
The co-operation with other archives, museums and other establishments dealing with maritime history continued to be good. Above all, the German National Information Office/ former: Wehrmacht Information Office for War Losses and PoWs (“Deutsche Dienststelle/ former: Wehrmachtauskunftsstelle”) in Berlin deserves mentioning, where a very close contact to is in exist.
Requests for information of a maritime nature, which were addressed to German agencies, are increasingly redirected to us for further proceedings. There are very personal and friendly connections to the National Archive at Washington and the archive of MoD UK.