Germany Cold War Google map and mission resource project [WIP]

[Pikey]

I could use some help from the armchair army to check the Google KML I am producing, before public release. Using a combination of KML's from Speedy on the army rumour service for the British and Soviet installations, a filtered SAMsite overview and my own work to collect, locate and organize the US installations I have over 1210 Google mapmarkers in the most complete rendition of 1960-1995 Germany's Cold War installations.

The KML will eventually become a key reference resource for locations in the upcoming DCS map. Mission makers can check the details provided for targets and mission use. The KML will eventually be imported to DCS as a rough template of locations. I don't intend to place any objects as there won't be a 1:1 parity  and there are clearly too many, but it is enough to add sites for your missions.

The KML for Cold War Germany comprises of:
Over 1200 placemarks categorised and colour coded (so far)
The inner border reference line
East and West Air defence sites (for West, the Nike Hercules is available for pre 1984 but dates are pretty tough to get)
British
American
Soviet/E. German
--Airbases and minor Helicopter airfields
--Barracks and installations
--Ammo Depots
--Training Areas
--Special Weapons Compounds
--Stores
--Fuel dumps/CEPS
The rough time range for these is 1960-1995.

What I am looking for initially is anyone interested in helping expand on this, specially if they want to zero in on, for example, enriching the US Kazernes with any reference links, tidying up the current placemarks, finding names for the unamed ammo dumps, checking the data with online references, etc. I'm definitely interested in anyone with knowledge of the Eastern European theatre, the locations and names of units and their stations, the airbase complements and time ranges. Also those with good knowledge of the FEBA and plans who can identify major themes that can be added to the KML or fill holes and gaps, such as the areas east of Luneburg and Hamburg, east of Braunschweig, east of Salzgitter and Northeim, etc.

Please don't ask for the WIP copy, it will arrive here when its done. Feel free to add details of the theatre to this thread. Whilst I've seen a lot of resources online, its not the finding of the information so much as the time it takes to create a nice placemark with links, find the modern day geo coordinates from the resource that is now hidden under a Lidl or BMW factory and so on. there's issues of time and date filters which I havent even attempted. It will never be perfect but thats not the aim.

[MiGCap1]

Perhaps I understand something wrong, but I can't find any West German air bases on this map and only Holzdorf and the Basepohl helicopter base of the LSK/LV on the East German side.

What exactly do You need in this respect? The location of the cold war air bases of both parts of Germany are no secret.

Edited March 12 by MiGCap1

[Pikey]

Hi @MiGCap1 I have no French or West German installations, the US ones are lacking and the air defences are in a generic folder as they are theater specific,so I combined all air defences into either east or west then by type. I don't have any knowledge of specific theater sized West German sam sites that are not Patriot or Hawk, so if you have permanent sites that were active during 1960-1995, I'd like to get my hands on those. Most of the kml's overlap with samsites.kml although I saw a few generic AD sites that were not. Age is problematic.

The gaps are the gaps where I have no information! If you have a kml of those parts you know about, please help out!

FYI, nearly all installations became West German at some point in the last 30 years, the date range makes this a difficult task where the changeovers happen.
Thanks.

Edited March 12 by Pikey
tagging @

[MiGCap1]

Okay, understood now. Try to help.

Let's start with the ground-based air defence installations in West Germany, 1965 and 1970, Nike and Hawk:

Die NATO-Luftverteidigung im Kalten Krieg

 

 

 

[MiGCap1]

 

And here is a listing of all cold war military airfields in West and East Germany, including the Notlandeplätze (NLP - emergency landing fields), located on the Autobahn (highway strips).

Militärflugplätze in Deutschland - Military Airfield Directory

But I suppose You already have found that in the web?

 

Some more info and a map regarding the NLPs in East and West Germany:

Autobahn-Flugplätze (Notlandeplätze NLP-Str)

 

I have to look for a good map of the locations of the flying wings of the West and East German Air Forces in my archives. 

 

[Pikey]

Oh dont get me wrong, this information is useful, but its out there. Its about actually placing it down to the coordinate
Here's the filter of the air defences, Hawk triangle, Patriot Circle, Nike Hercules Blue arrow:

But its not approximate by any means, its a nightmare. Here is a Nike-Hercules site in 2024:

It's a solar farm. the site was decommissioned in the eighties. This is one of hundreds of examples and how much work it takes now that the landscape is being covered up. A lot of installations like Kasernes are now Lidl or housing. The people that served in them are at least 55 years old. What I need is the coordinates of ones I dont have, which is even harder than starting from scratch.
Hope that makes sense.

[EvilBert VR]

@Pikey I have a copy of the so called: "Militarisierungsatlas BRD" (Militarisation Atlas of the FRG) where ALL military installations of the cold war area in Western Germany are listed.
And ALL are ALL in this case:
Airfields/ Heliports/ Autobahn-Landing Sites/ ADA installations/ Barracks/ Depots/ Hospitals/ Fuel Installations/ (Border-)Camps/ Bunkers, etc. The listing includes installations of German based Allies (US, CDN, UK, FR, NL, BE). I assume this is exactly what you are lookind for.

Drop me a line for further information.

Cheers!

...Oh, and of course their exact locations...

[Top Jockey]

Godspeed on this project, it will be my favorite scenario - Cold War Germany.

[Don Rudi]

16 hours ago, Pikey said:

 

But its not approximate by any means, its a nightmare. Here is a Nike-Hercules site in 2024:

It's a solar farm. the site was decommissioned in the eighties. This is one of hundreds of examples and how much work it takes now that the landscape is being covered up. A lot of installations like Kasernes are now Lidl or housing. The people that served in them are at least 55 years old. What I need is the coordinates of ones I dont have, which is even harder than starting from scratch.
Hope that makes sense.

I am curious, is this the correct site? As a few kilometers west there is an actual SAM site, converted to Patriot by the looks of it. 


Great project btw, thanks for your work! 

[Pikey]

2 hours ago, Don Rudi said:

I am curious, is this the correct site? As a few kilometers west there is an actual SAM site, converted to Patriot by the looks of it. 


Great project btw, thanks for your work! 

I have both the NIKE-Hercules and the Patriot site

Some are still obvious or history can show them, but others are not. And if I had a penny for the way the German government turns old missiles sites into windfarms or solara farms, then I would power my PC through this!

There's lots more to do, the issue is time, both my time and how much time has passed and when the sites were active and who by. We are talking generations since the Cold War and everything in the world has changed. The sites changed hands, from German, to US 3rd Army, back to German during the period 1945 onwards. One amazing example is an office in Nuremberg:
The SS HQ there was captured by the 3rd Army and called both the South Barracks and Merril barracks until 1992 when it went back to Germany and then went through changes until it became the Federal office for Migration and Refugees. This is an example, but these things changed hands, so the perspective of a modern German is that this is Germany, but from a cold war perspective, these places changed hands and capturing the accuracy is somewhat open to 'debate'.
In the same way, some Nike sites were replaced by Patriot sites especially after the withdrawl of Nike-Hercules in 1984 (approximately). So, those sites could be reused too. I must include the time before 1984 because it was so close to the start of the end and tells half the story, if that.

[Don Rudi]

32 minutes ago, Pikey said:

I have both the NIKE-Hercules and the Patriot site

Some are still obvious or history can show them, but others are not. And if I had a penny for the way the German government turns old missiles sites into windfarms or solara farms, then I would power my PC through this!

There's lots more to do, the issue is time, both my time and how much time has passed and when the sites were active and who by. We are talking generations since the Cold War and everything in the world has changed. The sites changed hands, from German, to US 3rd Army, back to German during the period 1945 onwards. One amazing example is an office in Nuremberg:
The SS HQ there was captured by the 3rd Army and called both the South Barracks and Merril barracks until 1992 when it went back to Germany and then went through changes until it became the Federal office for Migration and Refugees. This is an example, but these things changed hands, so the perspective of a modern German is that this is Germany, but from a cold war perspective, these places changed hands and capturing the accuracy is somewhat open to 'debate'.
In the same way, some Nike sites were replaced by Patriot sites especially after the withdrawl of Nike-Hercules in 1984 (approximately). So, those sites could be reused too. I must include the time before 1984 because it was so close to the start of the end and tells half the story, if that.

Basically all airfields changed ownership, often multiple times. You cannot cover that and imho one doesn't need to. Is it of any relevance for the Cold War map that for instance Ahlhorn was a RAF Base with iirc Typhoons and later Meteors? Barely anyone will be interested in the Luftwaffe Sabres and Noras there either. What matters for a cold war map are the Hueys and A-10s.
Same for Geilenkirchen. It is the NATO AWACS base, not an RAF base. And so forth.
About Patriot - I can only speak for Niedersachsen, but none of those Nike bases were converted to Patriot use before the end of the cold war, from the data that I have seen.
What I mean by this, don't make your life harder than it needs to be

[Pikey]

22 minutes ago, Don Rudi said:

Basically all airfields changed ownership, often multiple times. You cannot cover that and imho one doesn't need to. Is it of any relevance for the Cold War map that for instance Ahlhorn was a RAF Base with iirc Typhoons and later Meteors? Barely anyone will be interested in the Luftwaffe Sabres and Noras there either. What matters for a cold war map are the Hueys and A-10s.
Same for Geilenkirchen. It is the NATO AWACS base, not an RAF base. And so forth.
About Patriot - I can only speak for Niedersachsen, but none of those Nike bases were converted to Patriot use before the end of the cold war, from the data that I have seen.
What I mean by this, don't make your life harder than it needs to be

Exactly! The enemy of good is perfect. It will be good...not perfect

[Don Rudi]

13 minutes ago, Pikey said:

Exactly! The enemy of good is perfect. It will be good...not perfect

Really looking forward to that file, as it will help us mission builders a lot. And I know how much work goes into it, I spent the last two days creating something similar for Lower Saxony alone 

Btw, do you happen to know, if ED will give us a Nike Hercules for the Cold War era? Imho it is absolutely mandatory.

[Northstar98]

6 hours ago, Don Rudi said:

Btw, do you happen to know, if ED will give us a Nike Hercules for the Cold War era? Imho it is absolutely mandatory.

Despite being as relevant as it is, I wouldn't place money on it happening within the next 5 years. We still don't have Cold War MANPADS and the SA-5 is still without a proper search/acquisitionr radar.

[Retnek]

7 hours ago, Don Rudi said:

Btw, do you happen to know, if ED will give us a Nike Hercules for the Cold War era? Imho it is absolutely mandatory.

14 month ... maybe. As a rude work-around it's not completely wrong to set up a blue SA-5-site and limit it's range accordingly.

@Pikey two rich but somewhat strangely organised sources for the Eastern German air-defence sites:
https://peters-ada.de/nva.htm
https://www.nva-futt.de/

[Pikey]

22 hours ago, Don Rudi said:

Really looking forward to that file, as it will help us mission builders a lot. And I know how much work goes into it, I spent the last two days creating something similar for Lower Saxony alone 

Btw, do you happen to know, if ED will give us a Nike Hercules for the Cold War era? Imho it is absolutely mandatory.

I'd go with Northstars take on it, it would be faster to buy the high digit SAM team a lot of beer, and more certain.
The nuclear warhead option would be fascinating for DCS, right?!

[Pikey]

Just by way of an update, I've got a lot of German data from a willing volunteer and we are in the process of merging that with the existing US and British data. The remaining list of things to do are;
- Call the KML done and post it to GitHub so that people can pull and fork.
- Perfect the script I have that extracts the KML data to a simplified csv.
- FInish the script I made that spawns a unit named something appropriate - name | type.
- Save the mission of all the spawns.
- Review innaccuracy - I'll find out how badly converting coordinate twice is going to really be on the map.
- Break it all back up into parts that would work for an STM file
- Add the STM's and entire MIZ to this thread and uploads section.
- Add the STM's and MIZ to GH so they can be refined in public.
- Drink beer and fly.

[Whiskey11]

Going to dump this here and see if it helps you any... while the scope of The IADS Project is a bit more broad than Germany, we DO have most of the air bases and heliports in West Germany circa like 1991 pulled from an aviation airport publication for Europe.

https://github.com/Whiskey-11/The-IADS-Project

We also have a few of the more prominent missile bases (Pershing launch sites) and a few of the training ranges in Germany labeled, but it's not complete as that was a little out of the scope of our project.

West German NATO bases:

East German Bases:

Obviously the IADS project includes as many of the known locations for SAM sites in Germany in this time frame except some of the more mobile SAM systems.  ED has said Nike isn't coming from them, so hopefully modders can fix that...

The chaos (Without Nike):

 

 

Edited March 14 by Whiskey11

[TheGhostOfDefi]

@Pikey If you are looking for how certain areas looked back then. There are many websites showing older aerial photos for example: https://luftbilder.geoportal.ruhr/ covering the Ruhrgebiet. Or https://www.kreis-coesfeld.de/ASmobile/?appid=HIST_Luftbilder# for the area of Coesfeld. etc. If you need certain areas let me know.

[MiGCap1]

7 hours ago, Whiskey11 said:

Going to dump this here and see if it helps you any... while the scope of The IADS Project is a bit more broad than Germany, we DO have most of the air bases and heliports in West Germany circa like 1991 pulled from an aviation airport publication for Europe.

https://github.com/Whiskey-11/The-IADS-Project

We also have a few of the more prominent missile bases (Pershing launch sites) and a few of the training ranges in Germany labeled, but it's not complete as that was a little out of the scope of our project.

West German NATO bases

 

Husum AB  is missing ... at the Schleswig-Holstein North-Sea coast west-south-west of NAS Eggebek. Ground attackers (Fiat G.91 until 1982, then Alpha Jets), much more important than the Brekendorf and other NLPs (road strips). 

Our A-Jets were practising HIND hunting back in the mid-1980s.

[TheFreshPrince]

Am 12.3.2025 um 18:16 schrieb Pikey:

Oh dont get me wrong, this information is useful, but its out there. Its about actually placing it down to the coordinate
Here's the filter of the air defences, Hawk triangle, Patriot Circle, Nike Hercules Blue arrow:

But its not approximate by any means, its a nightmare. Here is a Nike-Hercules site in 2024:

It's a solar farm. the site was decommissioned in the eighties. This is one of hundreds of examples and how much work it takes now that the landscape is being covered up. A lot of installations like Kasernes are now Lidl or housing. The people that served in them are at least 55 years old. What I need is the coordinates of ones I dont have, which is even harder than starting from scratch.
Hope that makes sense.

I have done a short research and can confirm this is likely the correct site as I found an article on this solar park that states that this site was once used as a rocket launch site. Just in case you didn't solve this yet.

[mwd2]

Is there any 'real' military plan for NATO/Warsaw Pact when Cold War goes hot?

[Mqxle]

vor 3 Stunden schrieb mwd2:

Is there any 'real' military plan for NATO/Warsaw Pact when Cold War goes hot?

It is called General Defense Plan:
The General Defense Plan (GDP) of NATO was a regularly updated operational plan for the NORTHAG (Northern Army Group) and CENTAG (Central Army Group) in the event of a defense scenario. These plans, classified as "NATO-Secret," are now publicly accessible in the German Bundesarchiv .

The Warsaw Pact's attack plan aimed to annihilate the 1st German Corps and the 2nd British Corps in a pincer movement. The first wave of the attack was intended to break through the combat zone of the Dutch 1st Corps on its left flank, driving a wedge between it and the 1st German Corps. This would have forced the Dutch to bring in reinforcements from the Netherlands, causing a critical delay of 1-2 days. The 3rd Assault Group of the NVA was to advance via Uelzen and the Munster training area to the Weser River, aiming to cut off the British and German corps. The natural bottlenecks of the Harz and Weserbergland would have significantly restricted the mobility of the British forces.

Braunschweig played a key role in preventing an early encirclement and was to be defended primarily from the south. Both sides were aware of this threat, which is why the GDP included provisions for the deployment of German and British reserve divisions. The Warsaw Pact's objective was to reach the Weser and Rhein rivers within a week to decisively influence the course of the war before US Reforger troops could arrive.

NORTHAG adhered to the doctrine of "Forward Defense," which involved a 24-hour delaying action up to the Elbe-Seitenkanal near Uelzen. The outcome of the war was expected to be determined within this 24-hour period, as it was assumed that all forces would be exhausted by that time.

@PikeyI have Stasi documents from the GDR containing intelligence information about NATO FlaRak (surface-to-air missile) positions that were to be occupied in the event of a war outbreak. These are not fixed SAM (surface-to-air missile) positions but rather coordinates where mobile systems, such as ROLAND, would be stationed. If there is interest, feel free to send a DM. Also @Whiskey11 just in case you missed my DM on Discord

[Pikey]

I love hearing and reading about this stuff.
We've got our hands full just getting units in there just now, I will try to circle back to get the information later!

[Pikey]

On 3/14/2025 at 7:06 PM, Whiskey11 said:

Going to dump this here and see if it helps you any... while the scope of The IADS Project is a bit more broad than Germany, we DO have most of the air bases and heliports in West Germany circa like 1991 pulled from an aviation airport publication for Europe.

https://github.com/Whiskey-11/The-IADS-Project

We also have a few of the more prominent missile bases (Pershing launch sites) and a few of the training ranges in Germany labeled, but it's not complete as that was a little out of the scope of our project.

West German NATO bases:

East German Bases:

Obviously the IADS project includes as many of the known locations for SAM sites in Germany in this time frame except some of the more mobile SAM systems.  ED has said Nike isn't coming from them, so hopefully modders can fix that...

The chaos (Without Nike):

 

 

this is incredibly useful, thank you for bringing this to my attention. It's goign to take a couple of weekends to figure out the duplicates and overlaps and see which layer it fits in, but thank you!