Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to announce the soft launch of the German World War II Captured Maps Collection, the UC Berkeley Earth Sciences & Map Library's digitized collection of maps captured from the German military during World War II. Please explore our library guide that provides context for the collection and access to the digitized maps: https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/germancapturedmaps
From October 1944 to September 1945 U.S. military intelligence acquired large quantities of German maps in Europe and subsequently shipped them to an Omaha processing center run by the U.S. Army Map Service (AMS). These maps proved invaluable to U.S. military planners during the early Cold War years. By the 1950s, however, the AMS began to deposit these German maps in research libraries across the United States. The German World War II maps form important legacy collections in many U.S. map libraries yet remain largely hidden, under-cataloged and under-studied.
These German maps are important historical source materials. World War II in many ways radically altered the European landscape: towns and villages were eradicated, place names were changed, and political boundaries were redrawn. These maps will allow geographers, social historians and genealogists to trace families and communities. For researchers studying the history of science and technology the maps provide a rich trove for evaluating the German surveying and mapping effort of the first half of the 20th century. The maps also document the many crimes of the Nazi dictatorship. They served as planning tools for the war of aggression unleashed by the Nazi regime, allowing it to maintain control over vast territories and extract resources. Some maps functioned as resource inventories which allowed Nazi leaders to exploit occupied regions. Census maps were used to uproot people from their homes and to plan the murder of countless others, foremost in the Holocaust. These maps are invaluable sources for historians seeking to understand the Nazi regime and its horrific crimes.
Our goals for this project were to:
Scan and publish online the digitized sheets in order to make them more broadly available to researchers around the world; and
Create thoughtful organization for the map sets in our collection in order to understand their historical evolution and create corresponding richly descriptive cataloging records.
We began this project in the fall of 2017 when we started integrating deaccessioned German and Japanese captured World War II maps from UC Riverside into our own existing captured maps holdings (many thanks to Janet Reyes at UC Riverside). Over the past 3 years we have been working through the German military maps and have cataloged, scanned, and stored approximately 10,000 of the estimated more than 21,000 German captured maps in our collection thus far. The digital collection will continue to grow as we catalog and scan more maps when we are able to return to campus.
It has truly been a collaborative effort to bring this project together and it would never have been possible without the steady work of numerous units throughout the UC Berkeley Library and beyond. We extend our sincere thanks to:
Earth Sciences & Map Library staff and student library employees for managing logistics and physically processing the maps;
Library IT for their work managing and digitizing the maps, adding them to the digital collections site, and more;
Northern Regional Library Facility (NRLF) for their work managing the retrieval and storage of the maps;
UC Riverside Library for transferring their collection of captured maps to us in monthly map shipments;
Interlibrary Services for coordinating the shipments with UC Riverside;
Mail & Transportation Services for making map deliveries between the Digital Imaging Lab, NRLF, and the Earth Sciences & Map Library; and
Library Administration for their support.
We are excited to make this contribution to our collective understanding of these maps and look forward to the scholarship it will enable.
Sincerely,
Susan Powell & Heiko Mühr
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