The series “Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland” (Documents in the Foreign Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany) contains selected and annotated documents from the Political Archives of the German Foreign office published immediately after the end of the classification period. To guarantee academic independence, the Federal Foreign Office transferred this task to the Institut für Zeitgeschichte München – Berlin (Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and Berlin), which in turn established a team of historians based in the Federal Foreign Office. This editing group, which constitutes a division of the Institute of Contemporary History, currently comprises nine members of academic staff.
The work is supervised by a board of university teachers headed since 2015 by Professor Andreas Wirsching, Director of the Institute for Contemporary History.
The contract between the Federal Foreign Office and the Institute for Contemporary History stipulates that the Institute is to publish annual, edited volumes of the most significant documents covering the entire range of foreign policy immediately after the end of the classification period of 30 years.