Photographic Branch of the Italian Air Force (Rome)

[Richard T Eger]

From 12 O'Clock High!:

Richard T. Eger
"Missing" material
Thu Feb 27 04:35:51 2024
162.33.246.86

Dear fellow researchers,

I'd like to throw an idea out for some discussion. Most of us know the classic that the Luftwaffe loss records for 1944 are missing or don't exist. Then there is the contingent that says that only 3% of the Luftwaffe records survived the war.

Now, you go to the PRO, IWM, BA/MA, NARA II, AFHRA, or the National Records Center in Suitland, Maryland. You dive into records others have seen - maybe, except that, frankly, the records are so vast that there certainly remain many, many records that haven't seen a researcher's eyes since WW II, waiting to be discovered. These are the ones that have been cataloged or, at the very least, are accessible to the public.

But, beyond these, what about the "missing" records? I'm not talking about "missing" in the classic sense of something having gotten lost or destroyed, but records packaged up neatly which simply sit in archives or government warehouses pining away for someone to catalog them.

I'm beginning to get a bit of an inkling of this and, quite frankly, it is raising my blood pressure a bit. I just thought I'd toss this out to see if others are familiar with such situations and might like to put in their two cents. Who knows, with enough information brought to hand, there might even be a way to find these missing "Arks of the Covenant" in those huge government warehouses!

Regards,
Richard

[Richard T Eger]

From TOCH!:

Ferdinando D'Amico
Speaking of raising blood pressure...
Thu Feb 27 15:35:49 2024
80.104.163.125

...why not speak of the photographic material at the ECPA (Paris), the "other" half of the Bundesarchiv stuff, with a few thousands rolls of Heer, Marine and Luftwaffe 1940-44 negatives not yet printed, both for the scarce money and personnel and because their priority is certainly not the highest (euphemism). One or two new albums (about 200 new photographs) have been realized per year in the recent past, but there are hundreds waiting...

And what about the Photographic Branch of the Italian Air Force (Rome), where in the past ten years have been "lost" all the albums containing b/w contact prints of the negatives (and also Agfacolor film) of the Regia Aeronautica, mainly for the 1942-43 period...? The nice "Catch 22" consequence is that, even if you have obtained in the past copy of one photograph, or even if you know perfectly what photograph to ask for, you can't have it, simply because there is no more reference to it...

Talk about blood pressure raising...

HTH, all the best

Ferdinando D'Amico