Stielers Hand-Atlas, 10th edition, WAR3

The Stielers Hand-atlas, a renowned German atlas, released its 10th edition between 1925 and 1945, undergoing numerous revisions during this period. The revisions published from 1940 to 1945 are considered to be one of the rarest of all Stielers and can be easily identified by the missing publishing year on the title page. The actual publishing date of the revision can be identified from the latest date printed on the individual sheets. This revision of Stieler offered a contemporary perspective on the swiftly evolving political landscape in central and eastern Europe amidst the ongoing Second World War. The updated political boundaries were simply printed over the old ones, as complete reworking of the plates would be far more time and resources consuming.

According to Espenhorst, the editions published during WW2 were not sold publicly (were advertised as out of print since 1941), were made in very limited numbers and therefore are extremely rare (comparably rare to the first complete edition of Stielers Handatlas from 1830's).

The atlas consists of 108 double page maps, which is 8 more than the previous 9th edition. Each map was printed from 4 separate printing plates - water plate, terrain plate, road network plate and the place names plate. Additional plates were used to print the coloured political boundaries.

The 10th edition of Stielers Handatlas marked the end of en era of clear dominance of German Handatlases. After the end of WW2 Justus Perthes publishing house located in Gotha became part of the Eastern Germany could no longer not hold up to the earlier standards. Presumably also due to the political situation, Soviet atlases like Atlas Mira took the leading position of the atlas producing industry. After the owners of the publishing house emigrated to the Western Germany, the company was expropriated by the communist regime in 1953 and two years later it became VEB Hermann Haack Geographisch-Kartographische Anstalt Gotha.