MULTI-TEMPORAL ANALYSIS OF WWII RECONNAISSANCE PHOTOS

Abstract. There are millions of aerial photographs from the period of the Second Wold War available in the Allied archives, obtained by aerial photo reconnaissance, covering most of today’s European countries. They are spanning the time from 1938 until the end of the war and even beyond. Photo reconnaissance provided intelligence information for the Allied headquarters and accompanied the bombing offensive against the German homeland and the occupied territories.

One of the initial principal targets in Bohemia were the synthetized fuel works STW AG (Sudetenländische Treibstoffwerke AG) in Zaluzi (formerly Maltheuren) near Most (formerly Brück), Czech Republic. The STW AG synthetized fuel plant was not only subject to bombing raids, but a subject to quite intensive photo reconnaissance, too - long before the start of the bombing campaign. With a multi-temporal analysis of the available imagery from international archives we will demonstrate the factory build-up during 1942 and 1943, the effects of the bombing raids in 1944 and the struggle to keep the plant working in the last year of the war. Furthermore we would like to show the impact the bombings have today, in form of potential unexploded ordnance in the adjacent area of the open cast mines.