Description of the collections

Contains the collections of StB directorates within regional SNB directorates and those of district StB departments (identified by the letter B), as well as regional and district passport and visa units (identified by the letter D).

Inventories marked with the letter B are combined. They always contain the collection from the region-level StB directorates (previously called KS MV – Krajská správa ministerstva vnitra, or Ministry of the Interior regional directorates) as well as the collections of related departments and offshoot StB groups at the district level. Due to the fact that a territorial reform was passed in the year 1960, there are seven inventories. The first of the inventories comprises the older period (until the 1960s) as well as papers chiefly concerning fascist and Nazi parties and organizations (NSDAP, SD, Vlajka, Hitlerjugend, etc.), the Gestapo and its confidants, the resistance, the screening of both individuals and partisan groups, political parties, the church, foreigners, anti-state activities, youth, responses of the population to various events, members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), border crossings, and the displacement of Germans. Various photographs can also be found here, as well as Wehrmacht conscription papers and copies of verdicts pronounced on individuals tried by the MLS – Mimořádné lidové soudy, or Special People’s Courts.

The collections of the units in existence until 1960 are generally independent (meaning that they were not incorporated into the units that took over their work). We have, for example, both the collection from the KS MV Plzeň and the collection from the KS MV Karlovy Vary. The same applies on the district level. In some regions and districts, specific units operated – for instance, the Jáchymov MV Directorate, or train transport sections.

Outside of that, in a given regional directorate’s inventory, regional and district passport and visa units can also be found (identified by the letter D), and in some cases, passport inspection departments, as well. They are numbered in the same way as the collections marked with the letter B (that is, 1 – Prague and Central Bohemian Region, 2 - České Budějovice, etc.). In the collections of the passport and visa units, there are reports on activities, statistical breakdowns on emigration, protocols of travel documents, etc. One acquisition, containing materials from passport and visa units and passport inspection departments, has not yet been broken down into territorial provenience; it contains 21.6 bm.

The second parts are related to the first (with two caveats – the Part II inventory of S-StB Brno has yet to be processed, and for S-StB Ostrava, there already exists a Part III), containing documents from the 1960s and 1970s (and sometimes from the beginning of the 1980s). They mainly concern work plans of individual units and their evaluations, meetings including reports on individual issues, reports on the state security situation either generally or in the context of some event (elections, congress, the anniversary of February 1948, August 1968, etc.), breakdowns of individual issues (for example, right-wing-opportunist forces, youth, Chartists), information on concrete individuals, information on various operations, on agent networks, emigration, etc., textual records on the internal organization and administration of individual components, screenings carried out at specific units, etc.

It can generally be said that the above-mentioned materials come from the years 1945-1990, but there exist even much older time overlaps. The newer materials – from the end of the 1970s and the 1980s – have not yet been processed. These were selected from units of the Security Information Service (Bezpečnostní informační služba – BIS) over the course of the 1990s. They chiefly concern documents which were not shredded (if we don’t count the destruction of a number of pivotal documents, especially concerning the struggle with the internal enemy, in December 1989) and which remained with individual units in cabinets and safes. Thus materials came to the Archive which do not have lasting predicative value and will eventually be bumped, but which currently can help in the clarification of concrete cases.