After 1945, the old pre-war maps were still in use in the GDR. It was not until the Topographic Map 1:10,000 that the military map service in the GDR began to develop its own topographic maps, in close coordination within the Warsaw Pact. Based on the map 1:10,000, the TK 25 was developed as a generalization. Similar to the TK 10, the TK 25 provided a lot of information, especially of a technical nature, which was important for military use. There was no legend on the maps, the signature key, neccessary to decipher many abbreviations and numerical data, existed separately. In addition to the exact edition “Staat” (AS), the GDR issued another edition “Volkswirtschaft” (AV) since 1966 for private use. However, this map was highly generalized and distorted – only a very limited tool for orientation in the field. The IfL map collection contains mainly AS editions. As with the TK 25 of the German Empire, all map sheets are additionally indexed with a geographical thesaurus (landscapes, rivers, lakes).

open collection