There is great interest within both the scholarly and popular history markets in maps depicting operations on the Eastern Front in World War II. But although the Eastern Front has often been depicted graphically in published maps, these are generally either very large scale and ‘capture’ weeks or even months of operations in a single image or are small-scale maps that focus on a narrow sector of the front. And in most cases, the maps are inaccurate and/or present little information about the movements of specific combat units. Moreover, only one atlas devoted entirely to the Eastern Front has ever been published in English – Robert Kirchubel’s Atlas of the Eastern Front, which depicts the entire period from June 1941 to May 1945 in 272 pages and 128 maps.
This book will offer something completely unique by focusing exclusively on the 1941 Barbarossa Campaign, which holds a particular fascination for students of the Eastern Front because it was the only period when the German had a realistic chance of achieving victory. And instead of maps created by artists, it will present images cropped from actual daily situation maps produced German military intelligence in 1941 by and published in 1942 in Der Feldzug gegen Sowjet-Russland : Band I. Operationen Sommer-Herbst 1941 vom 21. Juni-6. Dezember 1941. Since this volume was captured by the US Army at the end of World War II, the maps it contains are royalty-free public property under US law. All of the 122 two-page maps it contains are available online at the US Library of Congress website.
The daily situation maps are highly detailed, showing the configuration of the front line and the locations of Axis major combat formations with great precision. The deployments and movements of Soviet combat units are depicted as German Army’s General Staff understood them on the dates that specific maps were produced. Since German military intelligence was poor, many Soviet units are misidentified and/or misplaced, and often dozens of major combat formations are not shown at all because they had yet to be detected. But although this means the maps contain many inaccuracies, they give readers the invaluable ability to glimpse the evolving day-to-day situation as it was actually seen at the time by German commanders.
This book will trace the day-to-day progression of specific 1941 Eastern Front operations by presenting cropped sections of the maps at 2-3 day intervals accompanied by text summarizing and analyzing the operations and highlighting points of specific interest on particular maps.
