More German petrol and oil companies have issued road maps than in any other country of Europe. Nonetheless, a number of companies have also paid for advertising panels on commercial map issues. In some cases, especially with maps from the Munich-based publisher JRO, it is a fine line to determine whether an issue was exclusively prepared for an oil company, or was sold widely carrying advertising. For this reason, the adverts for the German firm Optimol are now shown on a page of its own, and this page keeps to examples where the advertising is clearly just that, not full sponsorship of the map.
Sanwald was a small commercial publisher of maps based in Munich, with a unique system of marking street names on the exits from towns on its main map, otherwise drawn at 1:300,000. The map shown here probably dates from the late 1920s or 1930 as it was after the introduction of Esso motor oils, but before Standard replaced Dapolin petrol (see below). Section 20 covers the Black Forest and featured an open roadster on the cover; inside there were two advertising panels, with one promoting Olex products. The map was dissected and pasted onto grey cloth.
A booklet of place names was attached, including garages in many towns and villages. From this list, it can be seen that Dapolin then Shell were the most common brands of petrol; Olex and BV-Aral came next followed by Motalin (Leuna). There were very few locations for Derop and Runo, and a single Estolin tank.
AHA-Autohilfe GmbH was an alliance of breakdown and repair garages in pre-war Germany. In 1931 they issued a series of streckenkarten (strip maps) - strips 13/14 (shown here) covered the routes from Leipzig-Chemnitz and Chemnitz-Dresden. The maps formed an 8-page booklet, of which half were maps and half adverts, including a front cover promoting Standard-Esso products.
Deutsch-Amerikanische Petroleum-Gesellschaft, the Standard Oil subsidiary operating in Germany, had probably taken the front cover advert as 1931 was the year that they changed from Dapolin to the new Standard and Esso brands. Indeed, the only two filling stations marked on the strip maps are still described as "Dapolin-Tank". One of the internal adverts, for Auto-Neubert of Chemnitz, showed the delightful images above of damaged vehicles being taken in for repair.
The map shown here comes from the rear covers of a JRO-Verlag map, published by Johannes Roth in München. JRO regularly carried advertising on its maps of West Germany in the 1950s-80s, most often for Optimol lubricants, AVIA petrol or a Bavarian chocolate company.
The AVIA advert comes from map #181 Oberitalien (Northern Italy) and possibly dates from 1964, several years before AVIA started selling fuel in Italy. Several different AVIA adverts can be found on JRO maps.
The German company DEA only rarely issued sheets maps in the 1950s and 60s, instead publishing a small format atlas. However it was a prolific advertiser on Falkplan city maps, and an example is shown on the DEA page. Shell have also been frequent advertisers on the rear covers of Falkplan maps of German cities.
There are separate pages showing petrol company adverts from selected other countries in Europe:
