First and foremost, police records serve as a very under-utilized resource for resources due to the fact that when people were to move from one place to another, they would have to notify the police. The following resources, however, seem to be missing many of these details from the police records. Perhaps they were never recorded or they were too numerous to list in their publications.

People who moved through the guilds were governed by the presentation of their Wanderbuch, which was personally held and stamped. Immigration records, however, are numerous and detailed within the Polizei Amt. For most of Pommern, these records are held by the State Archives in Szczecin, Poland. For more information about searching these collections, please read our article on navigating the archives online.

It is possible that many of the original police records were lost at the end of WWII, or they may be held in a larger German archive.

Preussisches Zentral-Polizei-Blatt contains much information regarding people who were sought after or held in captivity by the police. Unfortunately, only a few years have been published, but maybe you can find information about one of your ancestors. Links are to be added to the project at genealogy.net and will be updated if new material becomes digitally available.

Prussian Amtsblätter Searches using the keywords “Polizei,” “Blatt,” “Blätter,” and “Anzeiger” may yield results. It must also be realized that some police notes were recorded in Amtsblätter for their respective areas of jurisdiction. The word “Amtsblatt” literally translates to “office gazette.” However, as an editors note, I like to think of the word “Amt” like an abbreviation for “administration” and “Blatt” as “blotter,” as in police blotter. It’s an easy way to try to remember what might seem as overwhelming for the beginning non-native researcher.