The series “Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland” (Documents on the Foreign Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany, AAPD) consists of annual volumes of about 400 – 500 annotated documents, published immediately after the end of the 30-year classification period. To guarantee academic independence, the German Federal Foreign Office transferred this task to the Institut für Zeitgeschichte München – Berlin (Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and Berlin, IfZ), which established a team of historians based within the Foreign Office. Their work is supervised by a board of three university teachers headed since 2015 by Professor Andreas Wirsching, Director of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History.

Four years after publication (in print and online), AAPD volumes are available in Open Access. Thus, the volumes 1949–1953 and 1961–1989 can already be read and researched free of charge.

Direct access to the open access editions can be found here.

Beyond the AAPD volumes, the editors group also published a special volume on Germany’s unification 1989/90: “Die Einheit: Das Auswärtige Amt, das DDR-Außenministerium und der Zwei-plus-Vier-Prozess” (Unity: The Foreign Office, the GDR Foreign Ministry and the Two Plus Four Process). This volume includes 170 documents from the Federal Foreign Office and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the GDR, dating from summer 1989 to autumn 1990. It can be studied in Open Access here. Moreover, additional documents on German unification which are not included in this edition can be accessed online.

Further part of the editors’ group is the joint German-Russian project “Germany and the Soviet Union, 1933–1941: Documents from Russian and German Archives”. Designed as four volumes edition, this bilateral series focuses on the Relations between the German Reich and the Soviet Union from Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 to the invasion of the USSR in 1941. It includes previously unpublished sources from a number of archives in both countries in addition to essential documents that have been published previously. It takes into account not only diplomatic but also economic, military, cultural, and academic contacts. The first three volumes up to August 1939 have been published in 2014, 2019 and 2023.