Alright folks, here’s how I tackled this project about Europe's shifting borders in 1940. Been itching to visualize that mess for ages. You see these modern maps, right? Clean lines, solid countries. Makes it seem like the ground under our feet never really changes, when history screams the opposite. War tears up borders like paper, especially back then.
Hunting Down the Pieces
First step was pure chaos – gathering the puzzle pieces. You don’t just type "Europe 1940 map" and find a neat animated gif showing borders changing week by week. Nope. Had to dive deep.
- Dug up everything: Old geography textbooks gathering dust? Found 'em. Archived newspaper clippings online? Printed them out. Military history sites detailing campaign advances? Took furious notes until my hand cramped.
- Stapled paper together: Ended up with a stack of conflicting maps – November '39 here, May '40 there, June '40 looking totally different. Dates got scribbled everywhere. My desk looked like a war room disaster zone.
- The Anschluss looked suspicious: Found one map showing Austria just... gone by '38? Had to cross-check three other sources to confirm, yeah, swallowed up by Germany before 1940 even started. So much for consistency.
Fighting Tech to Make Sense of It
Got the data, sort of. Now, how to show it shifting? I’m no cartographer.
Grabbed my computer, fired up mapping software. Thought it would be straightforward. Hah! Turns out drawing borders for countries that don’t exist anymore isn’t standard.
- Software fought back: Tried sketching. The lines wobbled like crazy. Needed clear, defined borders for Poland pre-invasion, during partition, under occupation. The tool kept smoothing everything, making it look way too clean for the bloody mess it was. Aggravating.
- Colour clash nightmare: Picked colours for countries. Red for Germany, okay. Blue for France. Then... Vichy France? Needed a different shade. Occupied zones? Puppet states like Slovakia? Suddenly needed a dozen colours, and the legend looked like a toddler’s paint spill.
- The "Animated" Disaster: Wanted the map to flow, showing changes. Set key points: start of 1940, invasion of Norway/Danish invasion, Fall of France, the carving up of Eastern Europe. The software choked. Borders vanished randomly, colours bled into each other. Spent hours tweaking transition timings, muttering curses under my breath.
The Nitty-Gritty and Why It Matters
Staring at dates and border coordinates gets real when you see how people lived through it.
Found personal stuff: letters describing how a village went to bed in one country, woke up occupied by another army, under new rules. That’s the gut punch. The map stops being just lines; it shows lives upended overnight.
- Highlighting key shifts: Poland vanished between Germany and the Soviets. Poof! Gone. France split brutally into occupied and Vichy zones. Yugoslavia got pieced apart after the Axis invasion. The Baltics... swallowed whole by the Soviets.
- Zooming in showed the mess: Even inside occupied zones, control was patchy. German military districts, Italian puppet slices in Greece. Made sure the map didn’t pretend Germany painted everything swastika-grey at once. It was fractured, contested.
The Final Battle (with Myself)
By the end, my eyes were crossing looking at all the borders. Proofread dates obsessively. Double-checked the occupation zones against my sources.
Finally hit export. The map blinked through those pivotal months of 1940, borders wobbling, stretching, disappearing, new ones clawing into existence. France crumbled visually under the arrows and colour shifts. Eastern Europe dissolved into partitions.
Sat back. Exhausted. Looked at that map shifting. Not just geography, but lives, nations, futures ripped apart and shoved into new, brutal boxes. That period’s chaos? You can see it flickering right there, line by shifting line. Powerful. Makes the history textbook chapters feel... real. And heavy.
