A number of people have asked me where to look for information about people or groups associated with the resistance during WWII. How do you figure out which of the many archives has what you want? Years ago Raymund Schütz, who is now at the Haags Gemeentearchief, gave me a f piece of advice that will help anyone researching the still-shadowy world of WWII Resistance.
To find what you’re looking for, you need to understand why and how an archive was created.

Every archive has its own unique mission, which determines what documents it gathers, catalogs and makes available.

A national archive, such as the Nationaal Archief (the Netherlands), the Archives nationales (France) or the National Archives and Records Administration (USA), acts as the depository for official government records, mostly generated by bureaucracies, and perhaps a few outlying collections that have been donated. They are public records offices, as the National Archives of the UK, used to be called. The availability of their records is subject to legislative control, meaning the researcher can only see what the current privacy laws allow him or her to see. Furthermore, if a bureaucracy is still holding on to its records, they will not be at the national archive. I personally have encountered this in the case of records generated by official intelligence organizations.

There are also more local governmental archives, such as the departmental archives in France, cantonal archives in Switzerland or city archives. Again, they are at base the official depositories of local governmental bureaucracies. So you’d find the working papers of a mayor here, but the working papers of a government minister in the national archive. These more local archives are also ruled by national laws but they are also more likely to have received donations of non-governmental but locally relevant documents.

Some bureaucracies have their own archives, such as the French gendarmerie or the French military or other branches of the French government. In Paris, the police have their own archive. Such archives are highly specialized and may be hard to get into. The gendarmerie archive, for instance, requires special permission, the ability to find them in the middle of deepest France, and the surrender of the researcher’s passport.

If you understand how the government or bureaucracy was structured and how it functioned, you will have a much easier time finding the documents you’re looking for at any of those archives.
More on non-governmental archives in the next post.