Britain’s towns, cities and landscapes have changed greatly since the Second World War. Through the destruction of war, the Luftwaffe opened a window on a United Kingdom never to be the same again. The great ports of the west were blighted by bombs and the centres of our industrial cities were ripped apart.
In the post war reconstruction of Britain huge changes have occurred.
The population has increased, motorways have been built, industry has migrated from the centre of town and cities, farms have and field size have grown.
The Luftwaffe archive of reconnaissance photography provides a unique record of the landscape of the past.
In the first years of the Second World War, and the years leading up to it, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to undertake a secret aerial reconnaissance of the United Kingdom (and all of Europe) in preparation for an invasion.
After the collapse of the Third Reich, the race to salvage the secrets of Hitler’s huge intelligence gathering operation began. The Luftwaffe archive was of extreme value both to the west and the Soviet Union and competing Soviet and Allied intelligence operatives searched desperately in the debris of the Third Reich for archive of the Luftwaffe.
In June 1945, British intelligence Unit stumbled upon 16 tons of reconnaissance pictures in a barn at Bad Reichenall, deep in the forests of Bavaria. The entire cache was transported and flown back to Britain. There were no announcements and few people were aware of this major discovery. The archive was classified as top secret and disappeared into the vaults of CIA and the British secret service.
Fragments of this unique record did leach out and in 1974 the entire Luftwaffe archive was declassified and free for public access. There is no complete archive and many of the records are missing yet to be discovered.
(Click through the gallery below to view each image)
