To the two volumes of documents which have been available since 1927 on the role of Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden in the unification of Germany are now added four further volumes covering the period from the foundation of the Reich to the Grand Duke's death on 28 September 1907. These documents, superbly edited by Walther Peter Fuchs, not only extend the chronological range of the original edition; they also enlarge its theme. This collection is without question one of the most important sources for the political and social history of the German Reich, containing as it does some 2,644 hitherto unknown documents on German politics as seen from the viewpoint of Baden, backed up with numerous parallel documents in the footnotes. The volumes emphasise the need for the publication of similarly detailed collections from the Baden archives (and indeed from those of the other federal states) for the years 1907-14, years for which - not entirely coincidentally - there is a relative paucity of source material. One Baden source - perhaps the most significant of them all - does not appear in the four volumes edited by Fuchs, however. Like many documents from the years immediately prior to the First World War, including some which survived the Second World War, this source will be unavailable to historians for ever more. For when in November 1918 certain foreign newspapers demanded ‘the publication of the letters of His Majesty the Kaiser’ to his aunt, Grand Duchess Luise of Baden (she was the sister of Kaiser Friedrich III), the Senior Court Chamberlain of Baden, Richard von Chelius, decided on his own initiative ‘to have all of the [Kaiser's] letters, and especially His Majesty's letters from the war years, transferred as quickly as possible from the castle to the Victoria boarding school’. The evacuation of the Grand Duchess's papers took place during the night of Saturday 30 November 1918. One week later the headmaster of the school, Dr von Engelbert, informed the Chamberlain ‘that as a result of the sharpened mood and situation’ in Karlsruhe he had no choice but ‘to burn the whole collection of correspondence as quickly as possible’.