Bavaria banned the Illuminati in 1785 and published their seized papers, and a duke's will sent the rest to Sweden to keep them secret

Adam Weishaupt founded the Order of the Illuminati at Ingolstadt on 1 May 1776. On 22 June 1784 Elector Karl Theodor of Bavaria banned unauthorized secret societies, and an edict of 2 March 1785 named the Freemasons and the Illuminati. In July 1785 lightning killed Illuminatus Johann Jakob Lang; his pockets held instructions and a list of names. In October 1786 police raided the Munich house of Franz Xaver von Zwack, who had fled, and seized letters and notebooks. On 26 March 1787 the government published about 400 pages of them. Weishaupt fled to Gotha, where Duke Ernst II gave him a stipend of 200 thalers a year. The Order ran on in Thuringia until 1787 under Johann Joachim Christoph Bode. The Duke bought Bode's papers, and after Bode died in December 1793 they came to Gotha. The Duke changed his will to send them, sealed, to the Grand Lodge of Sweden, and after his death in April 1804 they went to Stockholm^†. In 1883 they returned to Gotha by rail in a wooden box, the Schwedenkiste. The Nazis seized them in 1935 or 1936. The Soviets took them to Moscow and returned 19 of 20 volumes to East Germany in the 1950s. Since 1994 they have been in the Prussian state archives in Berlin^†. Researchers at Gotha are cataloguing them.