Those who died during the war, search by last name. How to find out where my grandfather is buried (fought). Memorial: find a soldier of the Great Patriotic War by last name

Today, anyone has the opportunity to find information about relatives and friends who died or went missing during the Great Patriotic War. Many sites have been created to study documents containing personal data of military personnel during the war. "RG" provides an overview of the most useful of them. Therefore, do not despair if you could not find any information about your relatives in the bank of undelivered awards from Rossiyskaya Gazeta - you can continue your search on other Internet resources.

Database

www.rkka.ru - a directory of military abbreviations (as well as charters, instructions, directives, orders and personal documents of wartime).

Libraries

oldgazette.ru - old newspapers (including the war period).

www.rkka.ru - description of combat operations of World War II, post-war analysis of the events of World War II, military memoirs.

military cards

www.rkka.ru - military topographic maps with combat situation (by periods of war and operations)

Search engine sites

www.rf-poisk.ru - official website of the Russian Search Movement

What you need to know

In the Russian Federation, there is a problem of finding those citizens who were participants in hostilities. Basically, these are the dead and missing heroes of Russia.

The search may be of interest to those who are looking for data about their own relatives. And perhaps some records in the databases will help find the places of their burial or the last place of residence. In addition, the bank of undelivered medals is still full.

In 2019, there are many Internet resources that allow you to search for information depending on the amount of data that a citizen has in his hands.

Thanks to these information retrieval and storage systems, each person can freely search and find data about their own relatives or help other people find theirs. Because cases about them can be forgotten in the archives more than 20 years ago.

Important Concepts

In the course of this topic, the average user may have difficulty understanding a number of terms. Their decryption in advance will allow you to process the necessary information more quickly:

concept	Its designation
Veteran	The title, which is assigned to a person for services to the country and the state. It can be service in military units, or hard work in production.
WWII	The Great Patriotic War, which began in 1941 and ended in 1945. It was part of the time period of World War II, although it began earlier - in 1939 and ended later, with the surrender of Japan in 1946
Reward	An insignia that is used to express a special degree of gratitude for certain merits
Portal	A large site located on the Internet and including a collection of information intended for the general public and open to access from anywhere in the world

Where to begin

Initially, you should understand that the search will be carried out on several sites and portals. Separate pieces of information are collected on different resources.

And if the first time it was not possible to find a relative, then you can try another site. Mandatory components of the search should be information about the participant in the war.

Various resources allow you to find data of this nature:

about the dead and missing;
working in the rear;
received awards;
those who died in German concentration camps;
about awarded living combatants.

All of these indicators can be searched. Therefore, you need to decide in which area this operation will be performed. After that, you can turn to selecting the desired portal for the search.

It is better to make a list of several - this will increase the options for matches, verification of information. Plus, some sites may have an incomplete base and lack of any details..

The legislative framework

The Immortal Regiment in Russia acts as a public patriotic organization. In this regard, their work, and the work of the resources of these institutions, is subject to accounting in terms of Federal Law No. 82-FZ “On Public Associations”.

This legal document allows the creation of international relations between societies - in accordance with Article 46. This makes it possible to exchange information and information on various issues.

Many discrepancies exist within the framework of the activities of such resources with Federal Law No. 152-FZ “On Personal Data”. Article 8 defines the categories of sources of such information that are available to all people. Directories and databases can be considered as such. In this case, it will be necessary to obtain consent to the publication of information.

In most cases, Internet resources place data on the basis of requests from citizens - relatives of the dead, who want to enter information about their ancestor.

But there are also situations when documents of a state nature are declassified. In this case, Federal Law No. 261-FZ “On Amendments to the Federal Law “On Personal Data”” applies. Article 9, paragraph 7, refers to consent in the event of a person's death.

How to find WWII veterans by last name

Search by last name is one of the most difficult options. The fact is that the more information there is about a citizen, the easier it is to find him. Plus, the last name can be quite common..

And this complicates the search, since the spread will be large. It should be borne in mind that databases on different sites consist of a different amount of information about people. Thus, the data range from 9 to 13 million people.

In order for the procedure to be successful, it is worthwhile to clarify in advance the following list of data:

surname, name and patronymic;
date of birth - year, month and day;
place of residence or from which settlement he was called up for service, in which unit he served.

This is the minimum data set that will allow you to find the necessary WWII veteran. Next, you can decide on the option of the search method. Because there are a lot of them for 2019.

Through the war archives

Archival documentation allows you to find information about those who served in different years, in accordance with the combat operations they took part in. The history of the veteran can be traced through records about him.

Such data is mainly stored in Moscow:

These are the main archives, but there are many of them throughout the country, so you should search in accordance with the place of service of a citizen. This can be done by contacting the military commissariat that called him.

Mechanism of action through sites

Thanks to sites, you can get information about a person without leaving your home. In this case, you only need a set of existing information and time. Next, you need to select the portal through which the search is carried out. And after that, information about the person is entered into the search form.

For example, Ivanov, drafted in 1943. The system generates a list, looking through which you can find your relative. If such an operation did not give the desired result, it is worth trying to use another site.

Memorial

OBD Memorial allows you to find information about a citizen according to a short list of data:

year of birth;
rank.

Based on this information, data is obtained about the fate of a person - whether he is in the database of the dead or missing.

Photo: search for WWII veterans by last name on the Memorial website

There is also an advanced search option, which includes entering data about:

what documents to search;
place of conscription, burial;
date and place of departure;
What hospitals were you in?

It is possible to search for prisoners in the camps:

Photo: search for prisoners in the camps on the Memorial website

Winners

This site was created for the 60th anniversary of the Victory and has more than 1.5 million veterans of the Great Patriotic War. Information about those who were in Russia and about those who are now considered a citizen of another country is included.

The search has a standard form that prompts you to write the full name of the veteran and select the region of his residence:

There is also an interactive map of hostilities on this site. With its help, you can view the progress of troops. And each of the stages is accompanied by a detailed commentary.

Photo: interactive map of hostilities on the Winner website

The feat of the people

This Internet resource contains more than 12.5 million records of exploits, and for 2015, statistics have established that more than 500,000 unassigned awards found their owners through this site.

The portal contains three divisions:

people and awards;
the documents;
geography of hostilities.

All known data can be used for the search. There are both standard and advanced searches:

Photo: search for WWII veterans by last name on the website of the feat of the People

Initially, you need to go to the organization's website and click the people and awards button. Then a standard search will appear, making it possible to expand it and enter more information about the veteran.

Other options

The site My Regiment involves the search not only for the military, but also for those who lived in the rear and worked. It contains data on the dead, missing and living people.

Photo: search for WWII veterans by last name on the My Regiment website

At the standard level, you can enter any information about a person, and then conduct an enhanced search indicating ranks, place of residence, and so on. Plus, you can tell your own story about a WWII veteran from your own family. To do this, they register on the site and write a story.

Is it possible to search by awards

It is easiest to find a veteran by awards. If there are insignia left or it is known about the assignment of any rank, then such a search will be effective. After all, this uniqueizes the request of a citizen and a more thorough search will be carried out in the database.

To organize in archivessearch for dead and missing in the Second World War 1941-1945 relatives by last name is necessary

1) Collect as much information as possible about the wanted front-line soldier (last name, time / place of birth; region of conscription into the army; place (s) of service; branch of service; number (s) of the unit (s); any official and unofficial hit notifications captured; field mail numbers from sent letters, etc.)

2) Apply with all these data to the Internet sites:

a) a thematic resource of the Ministry of Defense called "United Data Bank "Memorial"" *. Address: www.obd-memorial.ru

b) electronic bank "Feat of the people in the Second World War 1941-45."

Includes numbers and texts of award orders. Address: http://podvignaroda.mil.ru/?#tab=navHome.

c) "Memory of the people"

This resource contains information about the locations of military units at all stages of the Second World War. Address: https://pamyat-naroda.ru/.

d) "Immortal Regiment"

The sites of the public initiative moypolk.ru and polkrf.ru allow you to search for front-line soldiers in their own database, publications in the media, order numbers, archival documents, stories of WWII participants, etc.

3) Send requests to search for a missing person in the Second World War to unofficial archives and databases collected by public figures (you can find the names of those using Yandex and any other search engine).

4) Contact specialized archives (the capital's State Military Archive and / or similar archives of the former Soviet republics; archives of law enforcement agencies, etc.). When visiting a selected archive in person, you may need to make a statement indicating your personal data, the purpose of collecting information and an approximate list of requested documents.

5) Send a request for the search for the dead and missing in the Second World War of 1941-1945 to the archives of Germany and the countries in whose territory hostilities were fought. The main building of the German Federal Archives is based in Kobletz, and the largest branches are in Freiburg, Berlin and other cities.

6) Contact the local archives of German cities and lands (Dresden Documentation Center under the organization "Saxon Memorials", etc.)

7) If there is information about the approximate place of death of the wanted relative, contact local military-patriotic detachments, a list of which is available on the Sporf.ru resource (subsection "Region. Representatives").

Algorithm for finding a missing relative

The more data is known about the front-line soldier, the easier it is. Ideally, in addition to the full name of the person you are looking for, it is desirable to have information about the place of his birth, the date and place of conscription, the number of the military unit, etc. As a result of the analysis of documents provided by online resources, one can track the life path of an ancestor. For example, information from award documents will allow you to find out about the feats committed by a relative, the address of the family during the Second World War, etc.

"Missing"

Such a wording in the search results should in no case be the basis for terminating the search. According to the documents about the places of service, you can "calculate" the fellow soldiers of the hero and learn from them the details of the fatal battle. There are cases when fighters who lost their memory "surfaced" under other names. The main thing is not to stop searching, using any, even the most insignificant, "hooks".

It would not be superfluous to establish contacts with representatives of search parties (personal items and remains found by them often allow shedding light on events of interest).

It is important to remember that the fighters who were taken prisoner were recorded among the missing. To search in this direction, it is advisable to contact the Russian Ministry of Defense and the German Documentation Center located in Dresden, where data are collected on citizens of the Soviet Union captured by the Nazis.

How to act in case of failure

Consult with like-minded people and people who have been searching for a long time. From them you can find out the addresses of thematic forums and social networks (some sites are entirely devoted to discussing the front-line life of specific units and formations). The forum of the All-Russian Genealogical Tree website contains links to a great many links and archives, request forms to various departments, search recommendations, etc.

OBD "Memorial"

* The generalized computer data bank "Memorial" is an information archive created by presidential order No. pr-698 dated April 23, 2003 with information about the defenders of the Motherland, the fallen and missing during the Second World War (1941-1945) and the post-war period.

The mission of the OBD "Memorial" project is to provide citizens with the opportunity to establish the fate and places of burial / captivity / loss of their relatives.

The formation and content of the site www.obd-memorial.ru is carried out by the specialists of the corporation "ELAR".

Data on the soldiers of the Red Army and partisan detachments were collected by employees of the Logistics Service

- departmental archives (Navy, Air Force, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Internal Affairs, KGB/FSB);
- branches of the Russian State Military Archive;
- branches of the State Archives of the Russian Federation;
- specialized departments of the Ministry of Defense;
- open sources (newspaper publications; data of postal correspondence; reports of irretrievable losses; documentation of medical battalions and hospitals; trophy cards of prisoners of war; burial passports, etc.).

The result of this interaction was the creation of a global (and regularly updated) information and reference system with more than 13.4 million digitized pages of archival documents and 42,000 burial passports. OBD "Memorial" - the largest electronic archive missing World War II soldiers war in the world.

On Obd-memorial.ru, millions of scanned copies of primary documentary sources with information about personalities are available for study. Portal visitors can search for the necessary information about veterans online. Access to the portal is open 24 hours a day.

The search for the missing participants in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 can be done on sites (addresses are indicated above), which have solid databases with the names of fallen soldiers found by search teams. To submit a request, you will need to enter your full name and, if possible, additional information about the wanted person (his age, rank, military awards, etc.). The databases on these portals are constantly updated, so a negative result of the first attempt may turn into a positive one after some time.

An alternative to these sites can be an appeal to regional military-patriotic clubs, the coordinates of which can be found on the Web. The search engines will add a photo of the missing relative with the personal data of the deceased to a common database, after which the same enthusiasts across the country will join the search for the fighter.

And finally, you can write (call) to the program "Wait for me", the organizers of which are looking for missing soldiers all over the planet. To get into the database of the project, you will need to fill out a questionnaire on the portal "Poisk.vid.ru". The more information about a missing relative is known, the higher the likelihood of establishing information about him. Search activities begin immediately after the receipt of the questionnaire. According to statistics, Wait for Me employees search weekly for information about several dozen people, about a third of whom are ordinary soldiers, officers and partisans who did not return from the war.

Attention! Due to the large number of incoming applications, processing of new requests is temporarily suspended. You can search on your own in the databases "Memorial" (obd-memorial.ru), "Feat of the people" (podvignaroda.ru) and "Memory of the people" (pamyat-naroda.ru) - the search for them is absolutely free.

It should be noted that the search for the burial place or the military path of one's grandfather / great-grandfather is a long, sometimes difficult, sometimes expensive business. From the very beginning, you need to tune in to a long painstaking work of collecting information and analyzing it.

However, in general, it is a simple and straightforward process.

Data collection

Specify the last name, first name, patronymic, year of birth, place of birth, place of residence before the war, military registration and enlistment office, address of relatives, place of service, military rank, party membership, if there are letters - find the field mail number in them if we are looking for a dead or missing missing - specify the date of the last known letter.

Read the letters carefully, they may contain important information: about the type of troops, about the military unit, any details of movements.

Type of troops, military unit - regiment, division, army - this information is sometimes the key to finding, for example, burial

Primary Search

The base is unique, there are no analogues in the world. About 14 million sheets of archival documents were scanned and posted. Work on filling the database continues. Therefore, do not be surprised if there is no data for your relative yet.

Here you can find all possible (taking into account the fact that the database is filling up) references to a person: Books of memory, reports of losses, lists of the buried, etc.

The database contains almost all military graves where soldiers and commanders of the Red Army are buried. From Murmansk to Crete.

Additional information can be obtained on the website "Feat of the People". There is information about the awards.

If you know about the awards of a relative, then from the award documents you can find out information about the military unit, place of birth, etc. And, of course, about exploits.

In addition, the "Feat of the People" has a section on the Geography of War. In this section, you can find information about the combat path of the military unit.

If you want to know where your grandfather fought, who lived to see the end of the war, this is the main tool. But only if he was awarded.

Books of Memory

In every region of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, a multi-volume "Book of Memory" has been published. The Book contains information about those who did not return from the war. But! Information at the time of the publication of the Book, and the information that the regional commissariat then had. Some of the books have been reprinted.

"Book of Memory" is kept in the district military commissariat. It is necessary to contact at the place of recruitment your relative..

There is an easier way to access the "Book of Memory" - contact the Veterans Council. There, active grandparents will give you the "Book" and give you more tea.

Memory books can also be electronic. Then a link to them must be sought on the websites of the central authorities of the region.

Most of the Memory Books have been digitized and are in the Memorial OBD. In the "Advanced Search" section, a search for these Books is available.

Request to TsAMO

If the previous search did not give the desired results - send by registered mail request to the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense - 142100, Moscow region, Podolsk, st. Kirov, house 74.

The request looks like this:

======================================

142100, Podolsk, Moscow Region

Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation

QUESTIONNAIRE-INQUIRY

on the search and establishment of the fate of a serviceman

1. Surname, name, patronymic (wanted)

________________________

2. Year and place of birth (region, district, village, city) _______________________________

3. Where he lived and worked before the call (indicate the detailed address and name of the institution, enterprise) _________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________________

4. By what military registration and enlistment office was called, when and to which part he was sent _____________________

___________________________________________________________________________

5. Military rank ______________________________

6. Type of troops (by conscription and service) _________________________________________________

7. Party membership _________________________________

8. When written communication ceased (year, month, day) _____________________________

9. Address of the military unit at the last place of service (last letter) ___________

10. Who requests (last name, first name, patronymic, family relationship, home address)

___________________________________________________________________________

Applicant's signature - _________________

Reception led by __________________________

“______”_________20___

Request in the form of a word file.

=============================================================

After some time, you receive an official certificate of the place of burial.

It will say:

1. Killed (indicating the place of burial)

2. Killed (without specifying the place of burial)

3. Died from wounds (indicating the place of burial)

4. Died of wounds (without specifying the place of burial)

5. Missing.

If you know the place of burial, then take one more step:

After receiving an official certificate, write a request to the district military registration and enlistment office of the place of burial (depending on the accuracy of the indication).

Head of the military registration and enlistment office of the Demyansky district of the Novgorod region

We ask you to establish the place of burial _______FULL NAME______, check it according to the passports of burials based on the information we have from

1) Notice of death ____________

2) OBD Memorial (listing of documents) _____________

Copies of documents attached _____________

If there is no data on the full name in the burial passport, please enter the full name in the burial passport and perpetuate his name

Copies do not need to be certified, regular copies are sufficient.

If a specific burial is indicated in the certificate, then you are looking for it using the OBD "Memorial" - Advanced search, Search for burials

If the place of burial is unknown, then we do the following:

Died from wounds

Request to the archive of military medical documents of the Military Medical Museum of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (191180, St. Petersburg, Lazaretny per. 2) and a second request to TsAMO with a request to clarify the location of the hospital for the period of death of the wanted person.

Very often, the passport of military burials (if it is hospital) contains information about the hospital.

If there is any information about the hospital, then - a guide to the deployment of hospitals of the Red Army in 1941-1945.

Killed or missing.

This is where the fun begins. You should be aware of the part in which your grandfather fought. This will be in the certificate from TsAMO or in the unified database "Memorial". Your task is to establish the combat path of the division\brigade\regiment. Not armies, but divisions / brigades / regiments.

If there are letters and they contain a field mail number, then we decrypt this number.

If a part is known, then further - memoirs, maps, reports on hostilities, and so on. You can search TsAMO for reports and orders for a narrow period of time. It is quite realistic, for example, to establish the fate of an individual tank, and from aerial photographs to suggest the place of his death, and after polling the local population, to establish a previously unknown grave. But this is jewelry work, and most likely the local search squad can do it.

Burials

Sometimes, the military registration and enlistment office cannot give a complete picture, especially for the battles of 1941-1942. The maximum that they can give in this case is a map of the area's burials. But there could be dozens of them.

Keep in mind that the burials have been enlarged. Consolidation campaigns were held in the country 2-3 times. They are still being carried out now, the main reason is the transport inaccessibility and the impossibility of leaving.

The history of burials can also be traced by the OBD "Memorial". Sometimes, lists of graves are posted on official websites.

It may be that the burial was transferred only on paper. And where it really is - everyone forgot.

The mass grave, created in 1941 and noted in the documents, can simply "dissolve" on the ground during 2 years of occupation. Or it may be that the person you are looking for will be listed in several graves.

Museums.

School and local history. No matter how strange it may seem to someone, but school museums exist and are actively working on specific units and units. The most complete list of school military history museums is located.

Search squads

It is necessary to contact the search squad of your district / city, as well as the search squad of the area where your relative died / went missing.

On request in Yandex like "Demyansky search squad" usually everything is also found.

If there is no information on the Internet, call the department of youth affairs of the desired region and you will be given all the information available on the search teams in the region.

Information technology opens up huge opportunities for us. Now we can find a person via the Internet without leaving home. Some people use this chance to find out at least something about the participants in the war of 1941-1945. After all, how many destinies were then lost, missing. Today, relatives are trying to recover information, find out the details of what happened. Previously, it was very difficult to find a veteran of the Patriotic War by last name or other information, but now it is quite possible. To do this, there are many electronic resources and databases. We will write about them below.

Where can I find information about participants in World War II?

Get ready for a tough task ahead of you. Below we list the largest electronic resources, created with the support of the government and central archives:

"Memorial" is a project that is a generalized repository. There are more than 33 million records about the fate of soldiers and burial places. Search on the site is carried out, both by the name of a person, and by any other indicators. You can indicate the year of birth, place or title. You can additionally use the " Advanced Search". By default, the system will work with summary records compiled for each person from available documents;
"Memory of the People" is another project dedicated to the heroes of the Second World War. To search, you need to enter your full name in the line located at the top of the page " war heroes". You can also use the items: Combat operations», « military graves», « Part Documents". In them you can see the addresses of burial places and the names of the fallen soldiers, material about military operations, the fate of its participants, etc.

Both sites are easy to use. It stores a huge number of unique documents in electronic form, which are not found anywhere else.

Search for WWII veterans by awards

The electronic archive "Feat of the People" contains information about more than 6 million awards issued for the capture, defense, liberation of cities and territories.

You can search both by full name and by dates, names of orders. And if you have any documents on hand, you can enter the text from them in the appropriate fields through the button " Advanced Search". Then the resource will issue all award lists and orders in which this set of offers occurs.

You can also use the portal "About awards.ru". It contains over 20 million award entries.

List of military archives and departments

There is an option to go directly to military storage facilities and departments, to be interested there:

In addition, projects on which you can read old wartime newspapers. They often posted texts with photographs about the achievements of our troops at the front, in order to raise patriotism among the people, they listed the names of heroes and leaders:

You may have to spend a lot of time, but the more resources you visit, the more applications you leave, the more likely you are to succeed.

How to find the dead or missing in the war of 1941-1945?

Here we list the resources on which it is possible to learn about the fate of the people left on the battlefields:

Project "Archive Battalion" created to restore information about the participants in the wars of the 20th century. You can leave a request on the site with a request to conduct a study of the exploits of your hero, where and how he fought, died. It is also possible to contact the office, directly to the employees. The address is here;
Memory Book "Immortal Regiment". The site allows you to get information about Muscovites, both those who returned home and those who died;
Electronic memorial "Remember Pro" is a social site for those who are trying to keep the memory of their relatives and friends participating in the Second World War. You can create a memorial page for a veteran here, tell his story, publish photos and documents. And also do a search;
On the site