20th Century Press Archives  The 20th Century Press Archives () comprises about 19 million of newspaper clippings, organized in folders about persons, companies, wares, events and topics. It originates from the Hamburg Kolonialinstitut (colonial institute) founded in 1908. Within the Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWA) it turned into a unique public press archives. In 2007 it was absorbed by the German National Library of Economics (ZBW) and merged with the Wirtschaftsarchiv (economics archive) of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW), founded in 1914. Article collection was discontinued by end of 2005, but the archive is still open to the public. After a few years, the "Zentralstelle" (central office) of the Kolonialinstitut was transformed from a free information center for colonial issues into a comprehensive archive of global political and economic topics, which primarily supported Hamburg's merchants. After the breakdown of the German colonial empire in World War I, the renaming to "Hamburgisches Welt-Wirtschafts-Archiv" in 1919 sealed this reorientation. The staff of HWWA reflected its importance and grew from 54 in 1919 to 183 permanent or temporary employees in 1958 - a state that seems to have remained largely stable until the late 1990s. Founded shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the Kiel Economic Archive and its library were closely linked to the scientific work of the IfW, which focused on global economic contexts and their practical use. In 1966, the library of the IfW was given the function of a central library for economics by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the Federal Republic of Germany, and in 1993, the department was renamed accordingly. During the First and the Second World War both archives were intensively involved in the foreign and wartime planning of the empire and the Nazi state. Starting in 1936, "Confidential Reports from the Foreign Press" provided selected economic leaders and Nazi departments with "largely unfiltered information and comments on economic issues from foreign media and represented a unique feature in Nazi media policy". By acting with the informal means of a foreign cultural and information policy supplementing the military expansion policy, HWWA and IfW dedicated their services to the Nazi regime. In 1996, a closer cooperation between HWWA and ZBW / Wirtschaftsarchiv began with the aim of merging the two archives. Since the beginning of 2001, the articles were indexed according to a new common classification system and made retrievable via a reference database, "EconPress".