Each item listed at our Aerial reconnaissance photographs webpage is an original (NOT a modern reprint) half-tone air reconnaissance photograph, or group of related photographs, of cities and towns in the UK issued in 1943 by the German Luftwaffe (Der Oberbefehlshaber der Luftwaffe) within the German General Staff (Generalstab des Heeres).

They were prepared For Official Use Only! (Nur für den Dienstgebrauch!) in connection with bombing raids on Britain at the height of the second World War.

These half-tone aerial photographs are of the German Luftwaffe's military and strategic "targets" across Britain - cities and towns and surrounding areas, ports, docks, harbours, airfields, coastlines, and the like.  Every image is captioned with its subject and locality to assist in navigation, locational positioning and target identification purposes during the raids themselves.

The photographs were issued to Luftwaffe aircrew - pilots, navigators and bomb-aimers - in regional volumes with perforated "tear-out" sections, each containing detail of individual towns or areas.   Each volume contained the instruction "Zum Verbrauch! Mitnahme von Ausschnitten des Bildteiles zum Feindflug gestattet" ("To be used! You are allowed to take these photographs with you on raids").

In short, the pages containing the images referring to the target of any particular raid were intended to be extracted from their regional volume and taken by the aircrew on the raid itself.  In view of this, it's hardly surprising that so few of these original images have survived, and especially in as nice a condition as those offered here.

The photographs were compiled by the Luftwaffe from a number of different sources, some pre-war taken secretly, in preparation for the war, by German military intelligence from German civilian and commercial aircraft, others during the war itself by Luftwaffe photo-reconnaissance aircraft.  In 1938, the chief of the German General Staff, General Werner von Fritsch, is reported as stating “The nation with the best photo-reconnaissance will win the war” and, by 1940, Germany led the world in this field. Details of the different types of aircraft used by the Luftwaffe for this purpose can be seen at www.AirRecce.co.uk.

For a few of the towns in this collection, the Luftwaffe augmented their own reconnaissance material by reprinting any British 1930s commercial aerial photographs they had managed to obtain, annotating them appropriately with strategically important features for Luftwaffe aircrew coming over the target.

These original German wartime images, most of which have never been republished, have immense historical significance as some of the few surviving remnants of World War Two Luftwaffe activity over Britain and also as exceedingly scarce items of local history for the areas of the UK involved.

WW2 Luftwaffe aerial reconnaissance photographs of Britain now available:

Click here to see our current stock of these photographs.