The Military Geographical Institute (Polish: Wojskowy Instytut Geograficzny, WIG) was the cartographical institution of the Polish Armed Forces from 1919 until 1949. Colonel Józef Kreutzinger was the Head of the Institute from 1926.
History of the institute When Poland regained its independence in 1918 it faced a challenge of making a new set of maps for a new country. The invaders left behind nine triangulation systems with 8 reference points. The Wojskowy Instytut Geograficzny, originally called the Instytut Wojskowo-Geograficzny (the "Geographic-Military Institute") was set up in 1919 in Warsaw. Its first task was to form a coherent and updated system from the maps of Polish territory originally drawn by the partitioning powers (German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires). The maps in various scales were the foundation of the 1:100,000 scale Polish maps. By 1926 40% of the area of Poland was mapped. From 1927 onwards, WIG began to draw a uniform triangulation network and to print its own, original 1: 100,000 map, known as “type two”. These maps were two-coloured (black topographic elements, brown contour lines), some sheets contained two more colours added by overprinting. From 1929 onwards “type three”, i.e. two- and four-coloured maps were published. In 1931 a four-colour version became the standard type (known as “normal type” or referred to as the “tactical map of Poland”). By 1939 all 482 sheets for the area of pre-war Poland were published, together with around 280 additional sheets (wyłącznie do użytku służbowego or “for internal use only”) to cover the adjacent areas of neighbouring countries, i.e., USSR, Lithuania, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania.
Other maps publications of the WIG
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