Arbeitsstab für Karten- u. Vermessungswesen, Brüssel.

No authorized corporate name heading exists, but some OCLC records use the following name heading:

Germany. Heer. Arbeitsstab für Karten-und Vermessungswesen

I wonder if that is correct, though:

One really surprising thing is that the prefix “Kriegs-“ or the word “Krieg“ or the abbreviation ”Mil.” do not appear anywhere in the corporate name. That was, as far as I have seen, standard practice for corporate names of the various mapping operations of the Wehrmacht.

Might this mean this is a Brussels interagency working group set up by various German corporate bodies that had a broader set of purposes?

Just based on the material it produced I would say the primary purpose undoubtedly would have been to provide maps useful to the military and military administrators that were part of the occupation government and extracting resources and were concerned with mapping the infrastructure. But there are other reprinted maps which do not fit the pattern, including lots of maps of the Belgian Congo, so the purpose might have been broader: The Arbeitsstab mined Belgian mapping collections broadly and used existing Belgian resources to reprint and publish maps, extract useful information for a variety of purposes, etc.

The items in OCLC all date from 1940 to 1942 and are chiefly reprints of Belgian maps. But some sets were resized and edited to conform to German standards, like  

24510Belgien : ǂb Deutsche Heereskarte.

255  Scale 1:50,000.

500  German map based on Belgian 1:40,000 Series.

OCLC #44817798

What is really surprising is the level of interest in reprinting maps of the Belgian Congo, its mineral-rich Katanga province, and also particularly in Ruanda-Urundi (= present-day Rwanda and Burundi) an area administered by Belgium under a League of Nations mandate after WW I, formerly part of German East Arica. There are ethnographic maps that were reprinted and hydrographic maps of Lake Kivu, etc. Undoubtedly someone was mining Belgian collections with the intention to extract as much information as possible about Ruanda-Urundi, maybe becauseit was assumed that region would fall back under German control at an eventual peace settlement.

One 500 note in an OCLC record for a 1942 map gives a slightly different name heading. That might indicate a change in who oversaw this body, and how it transitioned into a body under sole military control.

"Druck: Arbeitsstab f. Kriegskarten-u. Vermessungswesen beim Mil. Befh. in Belg. u. i. N. Fr."

That record lists “Mil. Geo-Gruppe beim Mil. Befh. in Belg. u. i. N. Fr.” as issuing body.

OCLC #556753133

A collection record from the German Federal Archives in the Archives Portal Europe contains an outline of the structural setup of the German army’s military mapping organization for Feb. 16, 1944

For Brüssel (= Brussels, Belgium) the record lists a major presence of mapping-related resources:

Kriegskarten- und Vermessungsamt 9 mit Heereskartenlager 579 und 586

There is no reference to the “Arbeitsstab für Karten-und Vermessungswesen” but it was almost certainly defunct by that time.

Source:

https://www.archivesportaleurope.net/ead-display/-/ead/pl/aicode/DE-1958/type/fa/id/DE-1958_32569730-da32-4b15-878b-b115ffe7562a

Collection identifier: BArch RH 5

Collection name: OKH / Chef des Kriegskarten- und Vermessungswesens

1921-1945

Location:  Bundesarchiv (Abteilung Militärarchiv, Wiesentalstraße 10, 79115 Freiburg, [log in to unmask])

Another related collection is fragmentary.

Little of the administrative record of subaltern offices and individual mapping units survived World War II.

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/LGRGIAXSX2NGCS64FNPM523UOLKXRBKI

Dienststellen und Einheiten des Kriegskarten- und Vermessungswesens des Heeres (Bestand)

Bestandssignatur: BArch, RH 43

--Heiko

Heiko Mühr

Map Metadata and Curatorial Specialist

Earth Sciences & Map Library
50 McCone Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-6000

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