Die Wehrmacht: Der Freiheitskampf des großdeutschen Volkes (OKW / Verlag "Die Wehrmacht," Berlin, 1940)

The first annual volume of the German High Command's official pictorial record of the war, issued directly by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht and edited by Karl Fischer. A gravure-illustrated propaganda yearbook covering the campaigns of September 1939 through summer 1940 — Poland, the West, and the fall of France — assembled from reportage and photography originally run in the OKW's mass-circulation magazine Die Wehrmacht.

As a primary source it's the regime's own war narrative in its most produced form: photograph after photograph chosen to present the campaigns as the "freedom struggle" of the title, closing with a foreword over a printed facsimile signature of the Generalfeldmarschall heading the High Command. The book carries the state eagle to the binding and is a representative artifact of how the Wehrmacht documented and mythologized its early victories for a domestic audience.

Complete with the color folding campaign map in the rear appendix — the element most often lost from surviving copies. Field-grey linen hardcover, blindstamped eagle to front board, "1940" at the spine tail. No dust jacket. 

Condition: Good — light soiling to boards, binding sound.

319 Pages.

Offered as a historical artifact for research, education, and collecting.