Adolf Maps It Out
German Aerial Reconnaissance Photography of London and the Home Counties, 1939-1942.
The conservation movement in Britain has found a powerful new benefactor – Adolf Hitler. A new book has shown how the Luftwaffe's reconnaissance photographs of southern England during the Second World War are helping conservationists, town planners, geographers and local historians to examine the changes in the English landscape wrought not only by German bombers in the Blitz, but by fifty subsequent years of planning and development.
Adolf Hitler's Holiday Snaps by Nigel J. Clarke is an overview, literally, of south-west England from 1939-42. In the build-up to the Second World War the German airforce knew that any successful invasion of Britain needed to be informed by up-to-date aerial intelligence. Swarms of specially adapted aircraft, flying as high as 37,000 feet to avoid detection, photographed all the major cities, ports and military installations across a swathe of southern England, from Hampshire to the tip of Cornwall.
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