German History Maps II

The following is a list of 25 map clusters one might consider essential for teaching German history for the period 1870 to 1945. They are ordered roughly chronologically, as outlined in the table of contents, and conform loosely to the topics, such as "Imperial Germany," in the navigation bar above. The bar brings you directly to the topics.

I briefly describe the map, or map cluster, and (where possible) offer a link to a high resolution version of it. These links also provide more information about the map itself, unless, of course, I made the map using arcgis (HWS Map) or the map is from my own map collection (HWS Collection). The emphasis in this list is on publicly available, high-resolution images, with a mix of period and modern maps.

As was the case with the  Essential List, 1500-1870 , it may well be necessary to supplement this list with maps from the GHI project  German History in Documents and Images . For the time frame 1870 to 1945, they are divided into four periods.

1.  1866-1890 
2.  1890-1918 
3.  1918-1933 
4.  1933-1945 

Almost all of the maps at the GHI site come from the Leibniz Institut für europäische Geschichte in Mainz. For more of these maps, visit the  Digital Atlas on the History of Europe since 1500.  

It should be noted that this list is entitled "German History Maps II." A first list, entitled  German History Maps I , covers the period 1500 to 1870, and a third, entitled  German History Maps II I covers the most recent period: 1945 to the present.

German History Maps I, II, and III focus on space, not place.

I am also working on "Essential Lists" of German cities, on German towns, and on "Historical Places." or "Erinnerungsorte." City maps and views will be considered in more detail in these lists.

There are a few map pages to which one may turn for certain topics or to look for more maps.

The maps of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) may be found  here .

A very good collection of maps of battles and military fronts may be found at the  Maps and Atlases site  of the Department of History at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point.

One of the largest antique map dealers in the United States,  Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc. , has an interesting collection of modern maps (in addition to his early modern holdings), and they can be purchased and used as high-resolution downloads.

Likewise, the  David Rumsey Map Collection at Stanford University  allows high resolution downloads through the site's export function.

For contemporary thematic maps, published in 2009, see the "Nationalatlas" of the Leipzig Institute für Länderkunde:  http://archiv.nationalatlas.de/?page_id=28550 . In the "Nationalatlas," the maps come in pdf form. It is also possible to purchase them altogether as a cd-rom.

Another source of maps for German history is the " Atlas der Globalisierung " published by Le Monde Diplomatique. As the title suggests, most of the maps are wider in scope than just Germany. But in addition to being one of the best mapping sources for understanding our contemporary world, this atlas also features the work of some rock stars of the cartographic world, like Philippe Rekacewicz. The maps can be found in the maps (" Karten ") section of the Archiv of the website of Le Monde Diplomatique.

Wikipedia, and in particular Wikimedia Commons, has become a significant force for the distribution of maps, and should not be ignored. If you are on a particular page of wikipedia, go to the wikimedia commons page, and look for the map category or the maps themselves. Look also for the mapmaker, and if you are pleased with his or her work, see what else he or she has done.

Finally, one might go shopping. One of the best places for detailed historical mapping is  the Euratlas Shop  in Switzerland.

This "Essential List" follows conventional chronology: maps of Imperial Germany, World War I, the Weimar Republic, the National Socialist period, World War II, Genocide (the Holocaust), and the Defeat of Nazi Germany--as per the navigation bar.

I am very eager to hear of suggestions for changes and additions, providing that the maps are publically available for digital re-use and that they are available in fairly high resolution images. As changes are easily made in the story map format, and immediately translated online to everyone who is working with this document online, I am also happy to receive criticism. Unlike with a published book, I can still correct!

1.  Consolidation and the so-called Unification of Germany 
2.  Religious groups within the German Empire 
3.  The City and the Country. Industrialization, Class, and Suffrage 
4.  Language, Ethnicity, Race 
5.  Colonialism 
6.  World War I 
7.  The Battle of the Somme 
8.  Occupation Regimes 
9.  The last Years of the War 
10.  Losses in World War I 
11.  Revolution 
12.  Treaties of Versailles and Trianon 
13.  The Territory of the Weimar Republic 
14.  Elections in the Weimar Republic 
15.  The Nazi Revolution 
16.  The Persecution of the Jews in the Third Reich 
17.  The Start of World War II and its Expansion in the Summer of 1941 
18.  The Expansion of Nazi Germany and the Occupation of Europe 
19.  Genocide 
20.  Ghettos 
21.  Mobile Killing Units and the Holocaust by Bullets 
22.  Deportations 
23.  The Concentration Camps 
24. T he Turning Point in the War 
25.  The Defeat of Nazi Germany 

Mid nineteenth-century contemporaries were aware of the consolidation of territorial space as increasingly national territory., with nationalists convinced that the process was foreordained by history. One can see why. Using shapefiles from  the Euratlas Shop , here is a rough and ready sketch of the process of consolidation over time for northern Europe.

The unification of Germany is often depicted as the inevitable outcome of the consolidation process seen in the four maps above. What was less obvious is when the consolidation process would stop, and what states were large enough to claim to be nations of their own.

After all, in the 1860s, there were a number of German states, like Bavaria, Hanover, and Saxony, which, in terms of either land mass or population, were quite comparable to Germany's medium-sized states (not counting colonies or in Denmark's case Greenland), and these non-German states survived the consolidation process.

The process was also not inevitable from the standpoint of Austria, which many predicted would win the war in 1866 in a decisive battle, with the result likely a version of the following map.

But if you must tell the story as the coming together of Germany following the path laid out by the Prussian Zollverein, here are your maps.

And of course, the map below from the cartography and publishing house of Julius Perthes in Gotha. It displays the menacing power that Prussia had suddenly become after its victory over Austria in 1866.

In the end, two states emerged, one called the German Empire, the other the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Below is a map showing the German Empire of 1871 in the form it emerged: as a federation of states under the domination of Prussia. For higher resolution, click the link below the map.

For the same map showing upper level administrative divisions (e.g. Lower Bavaria, Upper Bavaria), see:  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Karte_Deutsches_Reich%2C_Gliederung_der_oberen_Verwaltungsebenen_1900-01-01.png 

And for the same with lower level administrative divisions (county) as well, see: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Karte_Deutsches_Reich%2C_Verwaltungsgliederung_1900-01-01.png 

Unification did not mean unity. The German Empire was divided in religious, political, and ethnic or national terms. The maps below give a sense for the geography of religious groups by showing (in the first map) the relative densities of Christian denominations, and (in the second map) by highlighting areas where Jews, who made up roughly one percent of the population, lived. They are best viewed in high resolution (the link below the map).

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Germany embarked on a process of rapid urbanization and industrialization that changed the relation between city and country and brought forth new forms of class division and solidarity. There was no single period in German history, as the comparison on the left suggests, in which the the change was rapid than the period between German unification in 1870 and the outbreak of World War I. Moreover, in the context of universal manhood suffrage, these divisions became central questions of politics, not the least because the SPD, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, became the largest party in the German Reichstag by 1912.

The following two maps show industrialzation and population density in the year 1900, when Germany was undergoing rapid transformation.

Germany counted among the earliest countries to adopt universal manhood suffrage in national elections, even though the democratic pressure of the parliament (the Reichstag) on the actual federal government remained limited. The Chancellor--until 1890 Otto von Bismarck--was, for example, answerable to the crown, not the parliament. Nevertheless, it is instructive to see Germany in a European context of gradual suffrage extension after the Revolutions of 1848. The graph below looks at select cases, using the percentage of those voting in terms of the whole population, male and female, above twenty years of age, as an index.

It gives the percentage for the first year after 1848 for which the source provides data and last year before the outbreak of World War I. For Austria-Hungary, only the Austrian lands are counted. The data for the graph is from Peter Flora et al, State, Economy, and Society in Western Europe, 1815-1975, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), vol. 1, 189-151.

The maps below only shows start and end figures, but includes all countries in the sample.

Th electoral maps below represent the outcome of key Reichstag elections between 1871 and 1912. The complete set of maps detailing the results of the elections can be found on the Wikimedia Commons page under the category  Reichstag Elections (German Empire) . As is true for many of the maps on this page, a higher resolution version can be seen via the link below the map. These links offer both SVG formats (which are scalable, so you can play with the images, put them on other graphics, etc.) and in ordinary high resolution JPGs or PNGs (which is what you will want to use if you are just using it as illustration in a powerpoint presentation). To really see the back and forth of electioneering in Imperial Germany, it is, of course, necessary to delve into regional and electoral politics. Jim Retallack, University Professor of History at the University of Toronto, supplies a trove of them for Saxony, made as part of his landmark study,  Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860-1918 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) . Some are included below. Readers are also encouraged to go to Red Saxony's extensive supplemental online site:

For a close look at one state, Saxony, see:  https://redsaxony.utoronto.ca/RTMap1874.htm 

Notice the predominance of the Conservative Party, and compare with 1912:  https://redsaxony.utoronto.ca/RTBastions1874.htm 

For a closer look at one state, saxony, see:  https://redsaxony.utoronto.ca/RTMap1890.htm 

For 1903, and for the comparison: a more-colorful period map

as well as the following period map, showing the same, in some ways in a still clearer form.

For a close-up of Saxony:  https://redsaxony.utoronto.ca/RTMap1907.htm 

For Saxony:  https://redsaxony.utoronto.ca/RTMap1912.htm 

And for those constituencies in Saxony in which more than 60% of the voters voted Red:  https://redsaxony.utoronto.ca/RTBastions1912.htm 

And finally and an Owl-of-Minerva-flies-at-dusk summary from 1918, showing the political changes in Prussian Administrative Districts and states.

Native language, ethnicity (if we imagine for the sake of a mapping argument that it counts as roughly the same thing) and race also came to divide citizens in the German Empire. These divisions were particularly politicized in the eastern provinces of Prussia, Alsace-Lorraine, and along the Danish border.

One reason for ethnic tension in the east was the work of the Prussian Settlement Commission, which, starting in 1886, settled ethnic Germans in so-called ethnic German borderlands and predominantly Polish areas in order to strengthen the influence of "Germandom." The map to the left details their activity. In its high resolution version, it is especially revealing of the Settlement's Commission's "borderland" mentality.

A screenshot of an interactive map (click the link below) of performers in the Afro-American entertainers in the two Kaiserreichs (of the Hohenzollerns and of the Habsburgs) from a new website, with lots of great material on  Black Central Europe .

This topic was more difficult to find good, publicly available maps than I expected. Below are two period maps. One shows German colonial possessions along with other colonies, and includes them in a shipping map. The second is a more focused map of Germany's colonies in Africa.

The map below shows German colonies in the context of other colonial possessions in East Asia.

One of the best collections of online WWI maps in English is from the Department of History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and may be found  here .

For me, among the most stunning maps I have seen are the rare hand drawn ones, recently on sale at  Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc ., of an as yet unidentified French artist who signed as H.M. Below are a number of his (or her) image maps from 1917.

Of use may also be a period map (1915-1916) of the western front (from the US Military academy), showing just how small the gains in the the major battles actually were in terms of territory.

This map shows the British plan at the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916. French and British lines in red, German lines in purple, first day objectives (not reached) of the British and French are in dotted red. The classic account is John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York, 1976), 207-289. When it was fought, the Battle of the Somme was the deadliest military engagement in the history of the west.

The map below shows the "progress" of the British and the French armies in the course of the summer and fall of 1916.

It is sometimes forgotten that Germany was an occupying power in the First World War. One of the most brutal and significant of these occupations was Ober Ost, mapped here in a propagandistic poster (on the left), and in a modern rendition (below).

Two maps crucial to the last year of the war: a map of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed in March, 1918, and one of the Entente's armistice conditions on the western front.

Even as the War was barely over, the question of who bled the most was a matter of considerable discussion and the subject of evocative maps and graphs. Below are three such maps, infographs, and charts.

The first was made in Paris in March 1919 as the discussions were ongoing in Versailles and perhaps understates German losses.

The second is from the polymath Otto Neurath (inter alia the founder of  isotype ), showing death as a percentage of soldiers who went to war in comparison with other conflicts. It may be set (in the image to the left) against another of Neurath's infographs (from the same book: Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft (1930), showing the size of troops in battles over time, and underscoring that in October 1918, the Central Powers had little chance to win the war.

The third is from Max Roser's team at  Our World in Data  at Oxford. It shows the absolute number of deaths across a range of conflicts in such a way as to highlight the cataclysmic numbers involved in World War I and World War II.

The last chart, also from Max Roser, shows these conflicts and their rates of violent death when that death is calculated as the share of fatalities relative to the world population at the time.

Below are two maps of the Revolutions of 1918, the first showing its wider context, the second narrowing in on Germany and portraying its evolution in early November, 1918. Both are from the digital  Map Archive of Le Monde diplomatique  and are shown here in low resolution. The links below the maps bring you to the higher resolution copies.

The final maps of the settlement at Versailles--first east, then west, then an overview--are shown below in medium resolution images. The high resolution images may be seen by clicking the link below the maps. N.B. The files are quite large.

The Treaty of Trianon did not address Germany directly, but it turned Austria, Hungary, and east central Europe into a series of small and medium-sized nation states with large majority nationalities, with baleful consequences in some cases.

Finally, an extremely clear map of the resulting order of nation states from the U.S. Military Academy.

Below are a number of maps illustrating the complicated sovereignties, as we now say, of the Weimar Republic.

The first three are from wikimedia commons, and as is often the case in these maps, the mapmakers draw on older printed maps--in the first case (the one directly below), the information comes from F.W. Putzgers Historischer Weltatlas, 89 ed. (Berlin, 1965).

The fourth map is from the color-happy cartographer Edwin L. Sundberg, who made maps for the  New York Sunday News  in the 1930s and 1940s.

Finally, there is also a map of contested territory in Upper Silesia.

We are less well off in this category than we were for Imperial Germany because there seems to be no publicly available maps of the Weimar elections that break down the data to county levels. For a list of the maps of Weimar elections on wikimedia commons go  here .

For data on how each of the parties fared in individual elections in individual electoral districts (Wahlkreise), see the tables in  Gesis .  Historische Statistik  under "Wahlen" ZA 8521: Alfred Milatz, Wähler und Wahlen in der Weimarer Republik, 1920 bis 1933:  https://histat.gesis.org/histat/de/project/tables/02D162CCC2309962070FAB8B4D954F53 

For this data ordered according to electoral district, see  Historische Statistik  under "Wahlen" ZA 8351: Jürgen Falter, Thomas Lindenberger, and Siegried Schumann, Wahlen und Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik 1919 – 1933:  https://histat.gesis.org/histat/de/project/tables/1DE30CBBDC0755808E1495F11AB63E10/1 

Below is a chart of the the elections from 1920 to 1933 showing the party with the largest votes as if Weimar were a winner take all system, which it was not. The effect is to make the NSDAP in the depression years seem more unstoppable than it actually was.

A close look at the Reichstag election of July 1932 shows the problem in greater differentiation. It also shows how polarized the country had become, with  electoral posters from July 1932  portraying sharp contrasts.

By the end of 1932, the majority of German voters voted for political parties (the NSDAP and the KPD) that wanted nothing to do with the moribund Weimar Republic, while conservative groups, working behind the scenes, actively undermined it. Still, the seizure of power was more than merely a transition from one undemocratic regime to another. In a very short period of time, the Nazis transformed their hold on power into a frenzied, violent, anti-Semitic, anti-left, and anti-intellectual cultural revolution that dispensed with the whole world of poets and philosophers, Dichter und Denker, that had once characterized Germany.

One expression of this revolution was the promulgation, on April 7, 1933, of “The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” whose purpose was to purge Jews and political opponents from state positions. As universities were state institutions, and professors civil servants, the cut was deep. The Nazis dismissed close to twenty percent of university academics, roughly eighty percent of them Jewish.

Another expression, this time more from the bottom up than the top down, was the series of book burnings that occurred in a great number of communities throughout the Reich. Beginning with the seizure of power on January 30, 1933, and continuing into the summer, and even, sporadically, until October, 1933.

Thanks to the researches of  "Verbrannte Orte"  (Scorched Places), a bilingual website dedicated to understanding this event, we now have outstanding interactive maps of the places where Nazis burned books (even if the researchers continue to research more examples of where these burnings occurred).

Another area in which the nazi revolution was felt was in cartography. The maps below are from a Nazi schoolbook of 1935 digitized in the  David Rumsey Collection at Stanford University.  See the table of contents below. I have included two high resolution maps, one purporting to show how unfair the Treaty of Versailles was to Germany, the other showing Germans outside the Weimar Republic.

The book, Die Karte Spricht, hardly exhausts the world of Nazi cartography. For a very good source of such maps, see the  P.J. Mode Collection of Persuasive cartography at Cornell University.  One example is the map below, likewise from 1935, purporting to show that Germany was under imminent threat of aerial attack from France, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

Recently, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, in cooperation with "Topographie der Gewalt," published an on-line map of anti-Semitic acts (Übergriffe) from 1930 to 1938, documenting more than 4,000 individual cases. The makers of this on-line tool nevertheless insist, no doubt correctly, that far from all the cases have been recorded. Below is a screenshot of the map and a link to the interactive site.

Below is a map of the communities in which synagogues were destroyed on November 9-10, 1938. The dots represent communities, not synagogues, so that communities with multiple synagogues are admittedly not well represented. Nevertheless, the map gives an impression of the dimensions of the destruction. A second version of this same map highlights Bavaria. This is because the map below it considers synagogues in Bavaria, and shows those that were desecrated (usually involving destruction inside the synagogue, including the tearing apart of the Torah scrolls) and those that were completely destroyed.

This topic is too vast to be addressed briefly. In addition to the maps here, see the very comprehensive collection of digital maps in the  Collection of the Department of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point .

Below is a map of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that shocked the west and gave Hitler the green light he sought in order to invade Poland.

The following three maps are of the invasion of Poland (or "the fourth Partition of Poland,"); the so-called Blitzkrieg in the west; and the invasion of the Soviet Union. The maps are from the  Atlas der Globalisierung  published by Le Monde diplomatique, and higher resolution copies can be found by clicking the links below the maps.

The map below was published 1941 in  Edioth Ahronoth , then a new new newspaper appearing in Tel Aviv; it superimposes a map of the front on "a map of European Russia, its natural resources, industrial centers, its main roads and its neighbors in the west."

Here too one could gather a whole series of maps, and I am acutely aware of how much is left out. Nevertheless, below are serviceable maps of the the Nazi occupation of the eastern territories, of its occupation of France, and the extension of Nazi rule by the end of 1943. There is also a wide-aperture view of its dominion at its height in 1942.

The OSS (Office of Strategic Services) made a very clean contemporary map of the occupation of Poland, and included its administrative units.

There are also maps, the richness of which we can only hint at, that document the extent of the destruction the Nazis and the crimes they committed. In the main, these were made in the postwar era. Consider two cases of maps made in Poland. The first of Nazi crimes, originally made in 1964, and published in an edition that includes English text in 1971. The second a map of the destruction of Warsaw, made in in 1946.

Self-evidently, this topic also deserves its own treatment. Good starting points are Martin Gilbert, Atlas of the Holocaust (London, 1982, and subsequent editions), and, for thematic maps along with analysis driven by digital humanities, Ann Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giodarno, Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington, 2014). As a reminder, the maps of the USHMM may conveniently be found on one page:  https://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/media_list.php?MediaType=MA . Other good sources for maps are  The Jewish Virtual Library  and Harrie Teunissen's website:  http://www.siger.org/holocaustincontemporarymaps/ .

No one single map could possibly encapsulate the genocide. The map to the left is simply a place to start.

In the following sections, I will concentrate on 4 aspects: A. the ghettos; B. murder by the mobile killing squads, or Einsatzgruppen; C. deportation to the death camps; and D. the proliferation of subcamps in the late phase of the war.

Mapping the ghettos has become both easier and more complex since the publication of two major reference works on Ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe from Yad Vashem and from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Currently, there is a project underway at the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure to mediate the differences in their respective spatial references in order to have an authoritative and mapable list. More about this initiative can be read here:  https://blog.ehri-project.eu/2018/02/12/using-wikidata/ .

To the left is a simple screenshot of where the ghettos were located.

Another version of this, my own, uses the coordinates of the USHMM Camps and Ghettos.

Below is a scalable version of this map, if researchers want to zoom in on the current village, town, or city in which those ghettos were located during World War II.

An interactive, georeferenced map of the Warsaw Ghetto with a slide bar to see where it is in terms of present day Warsaw. Click the link below the map.

This is a static map of the major killing routes of the Einsatzkommandos in the fall of 1941.

Although there is controversy concerning the project, Patrick Desbois'  Yahad in Unum 's emerging searchable and interactive map of the "Holocaust by Bullets" (red points are on line, blue ones are still being worked on) is extremely useful for communicating a sense of the density of the killing fields in eastern Europe in the course of Operation Barbarossa. Each point also has detailed information and in some cases clips of local people being interviewed about the killing.

The map, reproduced as a screenshot below, is here:  https://yahadmap.org/#map/ 

There is no easy way to map all the deportations of the Jews of Europe. It is in any case perhaps more useful to be able to see details, including passenger names, of individual deportations. To this end, the Yad Vashem Deportation Database is extremely helpful, not the least because one can visualize the routes and the makeup of trains on google maps. Below is a screenshot from the Yad Vashem site. To access the site, go here:  https://deportation.yadvashem.org/index.html?language=en 

Thanks to the painstaking work of  Serge Klarsfeld , the deportations from France have been minutely documented. The lists of those Jews deported, arranged by transport number, may be found in Klarsfeld's  Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France  (Paris, 1978). He later published Le Mémorial des enfants Juifs déportés de France (Paris, 1995), and this work has been translated into English as Serge Klarsfeld, French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial (New York: New York University Press, 1996). This book recreates names and in many cases short biographies of some 11,000 children, almost all of whom, save for just over 300, met their early deaths in Nazi extermination camps. Klarsfeld also unearthed some 2,500 photographs of these children, creating a haunting record.

With the permission of the Serge Klarsfeld Foundation, the pages of this book, including photographs, have been digitized. The digitized book is best accessed through the  Table of Contents  or through the extensive index of children whose  photographs have been recovered .

There is also now a map of the communities from where the children came, and putting this all together makes a remarkable resource. Below is a screenshot of this map, and below that is a link to the interactive map that is searchable by community and by the name of the child. The map was made by researchers belonging to the  Territoires et Trajectoires de la Déportation des Juifs de France , supported by CNRS, ES Lyon, and Serge Klarsfeld.

The mapping of the camps is likewise not as easy as it would seem. There are many maps that show the major extermination camps, but fewer that show these camps in a landscape of camps that includes hundreds of satellite camps, some of significant size and some far away from the main camps.

For an entry into these maps, see the media exhibit of the  USHMM on Buchenwald . A cursory look at an  OSS  map of of Germany from June 1944 suggests that the existence of many of these camps was well-known during the war. On the left is a georeferenced version of the map, and below the same map in full resolution. In 2016, the CIA put a number of its maps into the public domain, including some from its predecessor organization, the OSS.

The Allies knew a great deal, but they did not, if the maps below are a guide, know the half of it. The map below is a screenshot of interactive map. The map shows the camps detailed in Volume 1 of the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933-1945, ed. Geoffrey P. Megargee, with a foreword by Elie Wiesel (Washington, D.C. 2009), Parts A and B, and which can be downloaded, after filling out a brief survey, as PDFs  here .

Finally, one may well want to visualize the evolution of the system, seeing the moments when it expands and contracts, and where. To this end, the best place to start is a short visualization produced by Michael de Groot, Alex Yule, Erik Steiner and Anne Knowles:

The major turning point was, of course, Stalingrad

A map of the Battle of Stalingrad, showing the precarious position of the  General Friedrich Paulus  and the Wehrmacht's 6th Army as the winter of 1942/1943 set in.

The extent of the front after the defeat in Stalingrad (February 1943) and before the Battle of Kursk. The map is the first in the " Atlas of the World Battle Fronts " in the "Supplement to The Biennial report of The Chief of Staff of the United States Army."

Germany in 1944-1945, shortly before its fall. Link below for high resolution.

To the left is an infographic map detailing the bombs dropped on Germany and the destruction they wrought. It is from The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1947), 8.

It may seem odd to end a list of essential maps with a video. Yet I know no map that communicates the human toll of World War II as effectively as Neil Hallorans' "The Fallen of World War II."

With the help of a student, David M. Kessler, I used the same data (archived in wikipedia fusion tables) to recreate a stationary image of the military costs of the war. As is the case with Halloran's video, the chart underscores the huge increase in lethality in the summer of 1941, the near apocalyptic losses of Soviet soldiers in the first months of Operation Barbarossa, and the immense death toll that the German Army suffered in the last six months of the war. It also shows that in the European theatre, the dying was of an altogether different order of magnitude in the east.