The military archives within the Federal Archives currently contains around 750,000 military maps that can be grouped into two categories:

1. Accompanying maps to official documents (e.g. strategic maps showing developments on various fronts and annexes to war diaries);
2. A collection of topographical and special maps.

The wide range of military maps depict far more than just the events and movements shown in classic strategic maps. Military geography uses concepts from the fields of geodesy, geography, topography, geology and geoinformatics to make important contributions to defence and security planning at strategic levels and has concrete applications in operations and strategies.

Our fonds also include cartographic depictions of military geographic factors like infrastructure, resources, population distribution, demographic and ethnographic structures, geopolitical borders, terrain, weather and climate, water and bodies of water, and flora and fauna.

As the main duty of the armed forces is national defence, the geographical range of our maps starts with German territories but extends to all regions of the earth in which the German army, air force and navy have been in operation.

Our fonds include topographical map series made by the Prussian reconnaissance authorities in the German Reich, loot maps from both World Wars, nautical charts (e.g. of German colonies in the Pacific), aviation maps of the Wehrmacht and NATO, the course of the GDR border, depth charts for U-Boot operations in the Horn of Africa, and terrain and navigability maps of the Hindu Kush region.