An enterprise like Siemens AG keeps records of its history and upholds its traditions neither for altruistic motives nor purely for the sake of knowledge. In 1907 the second son of the firm’s founder and then “head of the enterprise”, Wilhelm von Siemens (1855–1919), already saw the potential of the company’s history and initiated the founding of the Siemens Archives in Berlin to mark the company’s 60th anniversary. At this time the only corporate archives in Germany were those of Krupp in Essen.

During World War II considerable damage and loss of archive material was incurred. In the immediate postwar years, the first thing to be done was to reassemble the archives that had been split between various locations or confiscated. By 1954 this task had largely been completed. In the same year the Siemens Archives were transferred from Berlin to Munich, where the headquarters of Siemens & Halske AG had been located since 1949.

From the mid 1990s, the Siemens Archives underwent a functional transformation to become a professional information service provider of legally and historically relevant information about the business activities of Siemens. New challenges such as the electronic classification and long-term digital archiving of documents, the professionalization and standardization of core archive functions, the increasing customer and service orientation and the resulting higher profile within the company have profoundly altered the responsibilities and goals of the archive personnel.