{{unreferenced, date=January 2022 The Seeburg plotting table ( German: ''Seeburg-Tisch'') was a mechanical plotting table used by

Nazi Germany Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...

in their operation rooms to track aircraft and coordinate operations during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

. Attached to the plotting table was a

Freya radar Freya was an early warning radar deployed by Germany during World War II; it was named after the Norse goddess Freyja. During the war, over a thousand stations were built. A naval version operating on a slightly different wavelength was also d ...

and two Würzburg-Riese radars.

Freya In Norse paganism, Freyja (Old Norse "(the) Lady") is a goddess associated with love, beauty, fertility, sex, war, gold, and seiðr (magic for seeing and influencing the future). Freyja is the owner of the necklace Brísingamen, rides a chario ...

radars would pick up and track the bombing raids and an attached Würzburg radar would then select an individual bomber and track it. The other Würzburg would track the night fighter that was sent out to find and attack the bombers. This plotting was done on a large, translucent glass plate. The radar position of both enemy bombers and the friendly night fighters were displayed on the table as moving spots of light. The enemy was displayed with a red spot and a blue spot represented the

night fighter A night fighter (also known as all-weather fighter or all-weather interceptor for a period of time after the Second World War) is a fighter aircraft adapted for use at night or in other times of bad visibility. Night fighters began to be used i ...

. The table had a grid that corresponded to the

Kammhuber Line The Kammhuber Line was the Allied name given to the German night air defense system established in July 1940 by Colonel Josef Kammhuber. It consisted of a series of control sectors equipped with radars and searchlights and an associated night fig ...

system (or Himmelbett as it was known in Germany) over the sector that was covered by its radar. The grid was a series of control sectors, that had associated radars,

searchlight A searchlight (or spotlight) is an apparatus that combines an extremely bright source (traditionally a carbon arc lamp) with a mirrored parabolic reflector to project a powerful beam of light of approximately parallel rays in a particular direc ...

s and a night fighter. Each grid square was further subdivided into smaller squares, numbered 1 to 9. This smaller grid represented an airspace of roughly 9 x 11 km, a size that allowed the night fighter to find the bombers with its own Lichtenstein airborne intercept radar. As the dots moved over time, the track was marked manually on the table by six female auxiliaries that were seated by it. A Luftwaffe officer would oversee the development and acted as a fighter controller, directing the night fighter to the closest grid via radio. Operations were previously manually coordinated using an ''Auswertetisch'', which was a precursor to the ''Seeburg''.

See also