Amtsgericht (District Court) of Moravská Ostrava

The fonds is a valuable source for investigating the Nazi occupation justice in the lowest instance. The court files deal mostly with legal issues of Germans and also, to a large extent, of Poles and Slovaks living within the court's jurisdiction. The fonds also contains death records of the fallen Wehrmacht members of the judicial district, persons of Reich nationality who died in the raids on Ostrava, suicides, drowned persons, and victims of injuries and accidents. An important document of the antifascist resistance is the death records of prisoners in the concentration camps at Mauthausen and Auschwitz and death

records of the executed persons in Wroclaw, and others. The biggest part of the documents consists of civil files dealing with inheritance, guardianship and custody (e.g. the inheritance file of Adolf Sonnenschein, director of the Vítkovice ironworks). It is also necessary to pay attention to the protocols of deaths of Jews during 1940-1943 (e.g. in the Jewish

orphanage in Moravská Ostrava or in the Jewish hospital in Přívoz).

The fonds is divided into Official books and Files (registry finding aids, files).