Ground truth dataset for German newspaper "Deutscher Reichsanzeiger und Preußischer Staatsanzeiger" (German Imperial Gazette and Prussian Official Gazette), which was published under changing names from 1819 to 1945 (https://digi.bib.uni-mannheim.de/periodika/reichsanzeiger/ausgaben). The ground truth is provided as PAGE-XML and URLs for the corresponding newspaper scans/images. Use the provided bash-script to download the images. The data paper is published at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2024.110274.