The fact that all historical documents about ŠKODA are concentrated in a single location may make perfect sense, but this situation was never a foregone conclusion, because many of them do not actually belong to the carmaker. This is because, after the Second World War, the company was nationalised, and all of its archived documents with it. When ŠKODA became part of the Volkswagen Group in 1991, the government and the new owner agreed that all documents archived up to 1990 (except for documents relating to the FAVORIT) would remain in the government’s ownership, while the rest would become the property of the new owner.
However, ŠKODA has made an agreement with the government under which it has full use and complete management of all unique historical brand-related documents, regardless of whether they are owned by the company, including documents that used to belong to firms that merged with the carmaker at some point in the past, such as Svoboda, Dobrý, Zahrádka, and Kotek, the predecessors of the current company (L&K, ASAP, and AZNP), as well as individual organisations that used to be part of the company structure, such as the ROH (a trade union) and SSM (a youth organisation).