[UNKNOWN CLASSIFIED SOVIET MILITARY MAP OF NAZI OCCUPIED KAUNAS] Plan g. Kaunas [A map of the city of Kaunas].

[Soviet Union], 1943. Along top corners: Pervoe izdanie. Dlia sluzhebnogo pol’zovaniia [First edition. For internal use only]. Scale 1:15 000. Single leaf measuring 81 × 95.5 cm, printed in color. In Russian. With index of street names printed to verso. Old folds; light discoloration and fading due to stock; pin-sized holes to upper corners; small sections of non-professional restoration with clear tape to verso. Still about very good. Item #55307

A classified WWII-era Soviet Military Headquarters (Genshtab) map, printed in September 1943, presumably in preparation for the large-scale strategic advancement of the Soviet troops to the West. Printed in color, the map has no legend or explanatory inserts, with major points of interest marked directly on the map, such as locations of hospitals, police stations, school and university buildings, banks, the airport, as well as the locations of the city fortifications, with a network of ten forts which date back to the nineteenth century. An alphabetic index of street names is printed to verso, in Russian. A note to the bottom right corner indicates that the map was “enlarged from 1:25 000 plan of the survey from 1927–28, amended according to reconnaissance of 1931–38”. This suggests that the map is based on a number of Lithuanian and possibly Polish sources from the period of Lithuanian interwar independence. Further reflecting the turbulent period, some toponyms on the map are marked in Russian, registering the Russian Imperial period, while others are provided in Lithuanian printed in Cyrillic.

Part of the Russian empire until 1918, the newly-independent Lithuania moved its capital to Kaunas in 1919, while Vilnius was under Polish rule from 1920. In 1939 the Soviet army occupied the Lithuanian territories and held a referendum, which led to Lithuania entering the Soviet Union in 1940. The advancing German armies occupied Lithuania by the summer of 1941, an occupation that would last three years, with this unknown map likely produced as part of the counteroffensive operation Bagration. The only known map of this area made by the Soviet Genshtab dates back to 1941 and has a scale of 1:25 000. The German military and administrative maps of Kaunas, printed in the same 1:15 000 scale as this map in 1941–1943 seem to have not been available to the Soviet troops, and could not have been the basis of this map, because this map does not show the multiple road blockades that demarcated the Kaunas Jewish ghetto (Vilijampolė quarter) which would have been shown in the upper left section of the German maps.

Not in the Russian State Library.

As of December 2025, not in KVK, OCLC.

Price: €1,200.00

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