Luftwaffe Target Code 10281

[Chris Going]

Larry, Hi

Just a brief response for now:

Its clear you have the Medmenham two-volume Index of Dick Tracy on the third floor. Probably a photocopy. But you have it there, which is great.

Catalogues were also made of other captures, ie: Patron, Tablet, Monthly, Tenant, Hutch, Orwell, the Russian List, and GX ‘A’. These were all very much smaller. I can’t remember if they were also at NARA. It occurs to me that any GX showing up on the Can Index at NARA is likely to be the US end of the Copycat programme. Somewhere I have an index of the Sorties in the US but not the UK, in the UK but not the US, and those in both places.

Scanning etc.
I first saw the GAF GX stuff at the Pickett Street annex when life was very different. What you describe is the system I met with over ten years ago when Jerry Luchansky was getting the sortie plot degree square acetates prepared for Microfilming. The Scanning is a major problem. As the overwhelming bulk of the GAF photographs are contact prints measuring 30 x 30 cm, and thus do not readily fit onto the platen of anything but an A3 or larger scanner. There’s the ‘no overhang’ rule, and the scanner lid must not crease the image when closed.

Unless the image can be safely housed within a clear envelope for copying, the curled print is a headache. A conservator could get them rehydrated and flattened, but that would be at your expense- so it’s a question of multiple shots on a copy stand.

Best

Chris

[Andy Mitchell]

Chris,

Many thanks for the explanation of the TM sources and background to "Dick Tracey".

I will file this away with my file copies.

[Chris Going]

You are welcome Andy

For the record ‘Patron’ comprised 1,600 Sorties, c 10,000 annotated mosaics, 4, 500 postcards, and 600 document folders. ‘Tenant’ comprised 100 sorties and 89 mosaics; ‘Monthly’ comprised 310 sorties, and misc iterms; ‘Lattice’, under 300 sorties, ‘Filter’, some 18 sorties, 1,176 mosaics, and misc hand books. Between them ‘Tablet’, ‘Hutch’, and ‘Orwell’ comprised 466 sorties, 3,211 mosaics, training material and maps, whicle GXA comprised sorties (taking the GX series numbers as a whole to over 21,000) and maps. Principal losses comprised most of the Afrika Korps material, destroyed in 1944, the Heeresgruppen Ost AOK’s who apparently left >10 000 films in Russia. The Luftflotten 2 and 3 print Libraries were destroyed in Paris in 1944. That Stabia OKL Print Library was burned at Marienstein, while the ZAF the Zentral Archiv der Fliegerfilm was burned when barges transporting it were immobilised on the river Saale in April 1945.

I’ve not written much about this in recent years, but I’d better get a bit more down….

Best


Chris

[Larry deZeng]

ChrisG. wrote in part:

Just a brief response for now:

I just want to thank you again. You have been a blizzard of fresh and very illuminating information on a dark corner of Luftwaffe primary source material that very few researchers know anything about. Additionally, it's a shock to me to see that there is still a lot of Luftwaffe photo reconnaissance material "out there", as given in your Post of 19th May 2019 08:18, or that we know was destroyed, intentionally or otherwise. Outstanding stuff and an outstanding job summing it up and sharing it.

Very best,

Larry

[Andy Mitchell]

Tony,

Many thanks for the correction. Error caused by combination of bad sight and bad copy on screen.

All the very best

[edwest2]

As an aside to post #21. The majority of people involved with the Luftwaffe are modellers, and those who decided to satisfy their curiosity. Professional researchers have decided, for whatever reason, to deal with the time-consuming, less than romantic, other material. My hat is off to all the researchers and authors here. I've learned a lot.

My suggestion is to create a central database or publication to hand off to new researchers and current researchers. If this work is to continue, I think there needs to be a kind of 'starter kit.'

I would like to add the following book as a reference. Partners at the Creation by James H. Critchfield. It covers the creation of a post-war German intelligence service headed by Reinhard Gehlen and Hitler's former chief of operations, Adolf Heusinger. "In July 1945 when Reinhard Gehlen arrived at the Twelfth Army Group interrogation center at Wiesbaden, Germany, he and his surviving staff (and the carefully cached files on Soviet tactical and strategic military strength) constituted the only comprehensive information on Soviet military power held anywhere by anyone in the entire world." This undertaking is referred to as Operation Rusty.


Did the files held by Gehlen survive?

[Larry deZeng]

Yes. Gehlen's FHO (Fremde Heere Ost) material was eventually brought to the U.S., as was Gehlen and some of his staff, and his files were eventually microfilmed and incorporated into NARA Record 242, Microcopy T-78 (Records of the German Army High Command). As might be expected, a lot of Gehlen's files were withheld from microfilming and today are in the hands of the CIA and the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst). Most of the withheld material consisted of files and card indexes on agents. There are several good biographies on Gehlen where those interested can find more details.

L.