“Missing in action” - many people received notices with this phrase during the war years. There were millions of them, and the fate of these defenders of the Motherland remained unknown for a long time. In most cases, it remains unknown today, but there is still some progress in clarifying the circumstances of the disappearance of the soldiers. Several circumstances contribute to this. Firstly, new technological capabilities have emerged for search automation necessary documents. Secondly, useful and the right job search teams are conducting. Thirdly, the archives of the Ministry of Defense have become more accessible. But even today, in the vast majority of cases, ordinary citizens do not know where to look for those missing in action during the Second World War. This article may help someone find out the fate of their loved ones.
Search difficulties
In addition to factors that contribute to success, there are also those that make it difficult to find those missing in action during the Second World War. Too much time has passed, and there is less and less material evidence of events. There are also no more people who can confirm this or that fact. In addition, missing persons were considered suspicious during and after the war. It was believed that a soldier or officer could be captured, which in those years was considered almost a betrayal. A Red Army soldier could go over to the enemy’s side, and this happened, unfortunately, often. The fate of traitors is mostly known. Collaborators who were caught and identified were tried and either executed or given long sentences. Others found refuge in distant lands. Those of them who have survived to this day usually do not want to be found.
Where to look for missing prisoners of war during WWII
The fates of many Soviet prisoners of war after the war developed differently. Some were pardoned by the Stalinist punitive machine, and they returned home safely, although for the rest of their lives they did not feel like full-fledged veterans and they themselves felt some guilt before the “normal” participants in the hostilities. Others were destined for a long journey through places of detention, camps and prisons, where they most often ended up on unsubstantiated charges. A number of soldiers released from captivity ended up in the American, French or British occupation zones. These, as a rule, were handed over by the allies to the Soviet troops, but there were exceptions. For the most part, our soldiers wanted to go home to their families, but rare realists understood what awaited them and asked for asylum. Not all of them were traitors - many simply did not want to cut down forest in the Far North or dig canals. In some cases, they find themselves, contact relatives and even assign them foreign inheritances. However, in this case, the search for those missing in action during the Second World War 1941-1945 can be difficult, especially if such a former prisoner changed his last name and does not want to remember his homeland. Well, people are different, as are their destinies, and it’s hard to condemn those who ate bitter bread in a foreign land.
Documentary trail
However, in the vast majority of cases the situation was much simpler and more tragic. In the initial period of the war, soldiers simply died in unknown cauldrons, sometimes together with their commanders, and there was no one to write reports on irreparable losses. Sometimes there were no bodies left, or it was impossible to identify the remains. It would seem, where to look for those missing in action during the Second World War with such confusion?
But there is always one thread left, by pulling which you can somehow unravel the history of the person of interest. The fact is that any person, and especially a military man, leaves behind a “paper” trail. His whole life is accompanied by documentary circulation: clothing and food certificates are issued for a soldier or officer, he is included in the In case of injury in a hospital, a medical record is opened for a soldier. Here is the answer to the question of where to look for missing people. The Second World War ended long ago, but the documents are kept. Where? In the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense, in Podolsk.
Central Archive of the Moscow Region
The application procedure itself is simple, and it is also free. The archives of the Ministry of Defense do not require money for the search for those missing in the Second World War of 1941-1945, and bear the costs of sending the answer. In order to make a request, you need to collect as much personal information as possible about who you want to find. The more there is, the easier it will be for Central Asian workers to decide where to look for those missing in action during the Great Patriotic War, in which storage and on which shelf the treasured document may lie.
First of all, you need your last name, first name and patronymic, place and date of birth, information about where you were called from, where you were sent and when. If any documentary evidence, notices or even personal letters have been preserved, then, if possible, they should be included (copies). Information about government awards, incentives, injuries and any other information related to service in the Armed Forces of the USSR will also not be superfluous. If you know in which the missing person served, his unit number and rank, then this should also be reported. In general, everything that is possible, but only reliable. All that remains is to put it all on paper, send it by letter to the Archive’s address and wait for a response. It won't be soon, but it will definitely happen. The people who work in the Central Election Commission of Moscow Region are obligatory and responsible.
Foreign archives
In the Second World War of 1941-1945, if the answer is negative from Podolsk, you should continue abroad. The hard times took Soviet soldiers languishing in captivity wherever they went. Their traces are found in Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Austria, Holland, Norway and, of course, Germany. The Germans kept documentation pedantically; a card was issued for each prisoner, equipped with a photograph and personal data, and if the documents were not damaged during hostilities or bombings, the answer would be found. The information concerns not only prisoners of war, but also those who were involved in forced labor. The search for missing persons in the Second World War sometimes makes it possible to find out about the heroic behavior of a relative in a concentration camp, and if not, then at least clarity will be brought into his fate.
The answer is usually laconic. Archives report on the settlement in the area of which he adopted his last Stand Red or Red soldier Soviet army. Information about the place of pre-war residence, the date from which the soldier was removed from all types of allowance, and the place of his burial are confirmed. This is due to the fact that searching for missing persons in the Great Patriotic War by last name, and even by first name and patronymic, can lead to ambiguous results. Additional confirmation can be provided by the data of relatives to whom the notification should have been sent. If the burial place is indicated as unknown, then it is usually a mass grave located near the specified settlement. It is important to remember that reports on casualties were often compiled at the battlefields, and they were written in not very legible handwriting. Searching for missing persons in WWII 1941-1945 can be difficult due to the fact that the letter “a” resembles an “o”, or something like that.
Search engines
In recent decades, the search movement has become widespread. Enthusiasts who want to clarify the question of the fate of millions of soldiers who laid down their lives for their Motherland are engaged in a noble task - they find the remains of fallen soldiers, determine by many signs whether they belong to one unit or another, and do everything to find out their last names. No one knows better than these people where to look for those missing in action during the Second World War. In the forests near Yelnya, in the swamps of the Leningrad region, near Rzhev, where fierce battles took place, they conduct careful excavations, handing over to their native land its defenders with military honors. Search teams send information to government officials and the military, who update their databases.
Electronic means
Today, everyone who wants to find out the fate of their glorious ancestors has the opportunity to look into the commander’s reports from the battlefields. And you can do this without leaving your home. On the website of the Ministry of Defense archive you can familiarize yourself with unique documents and verify the veracity of the information provided. These pages emanate living history; they seem to create a bridge between eras. Searching for missing persons in the Great Patriotic War by last name is not difficult, the interface is convenient and accessible to everyone, including the elderly. In any case, we need to start with the lists of the dead. After all, the “funeral” could simply not come, and for many decades the soldier was considered missing.
Calculations of the number of missing Soviet soldiers during the Great Patriotic War are still ongoing. However, given the lack of information and the contradictory nature of some information, this will not be easy to do.
Difficulties in counting
Almost every Russian family has relatives who disappeared during the Great Patriotic War. It is no longer possible to know the fate of many of them. Thus, the talented military pilot Leonid Khrushchev, the son of the first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee (in 1953-1964) Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, is still considered missing.
In 1966-1968, the calculation of human losses in the Great Patriotic War was carried out by a commission General Staff, in 1988-1993, a team of military historians was engaged in collating and verifying the materials of all previous commissions. Despite this, we still do not know exactly how many Soviet soldiers and officers died in this war, especially since there is no accurate data on the number of missing people.
Today, the data on losses that were published in 1993 by a group of researchers led by Grigory Krivosheev, a consultant at the Military Memorial Center of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, are recognized as official. However, Doctor of Historical Sciences Makhmut Gareev does not consider these data final, finding many flaws in the commission’s calculations. In particular, some researchers call the figure for the total losses of the Soviet Union during the war years at 26.6 million incorrect.
Writer Rafael Grugman points out a number of pitfalls that the commission did not pay attention to and which will pose a challenge to any researcher. In particular, the commission did not take into account such a category of persons as policemen and Vlasovites killed by partisans and killed in battles with the Red Army. What types of losses should they be classified as: dead or missing? Or even be included in the enemy’s camp?
Often, in front-line reports, missing persons were combined with prisoners, which today causes considerable confusion when counting them. For example, it is not clear who to include the soldiers who did not return from captivity, because among them there were those who died, those who joined the enemy, and those who remained abroad.
Very often, the missing were included in the lists with the total number of losses. So, after the Kyiv defensive operation(1941) the missing were classified as killed and captured - more than 616 thousand people in total.
Today, there are many unmarked graves where Soviet soldiers are buried, and it is completely unclear how many of them are listed as missing. We should not forget about deserters. According to official data alone, about 500 thousand conscripts disappeared without a trace on the way to the military registration and enlistment offices.
Another problem is the almost complete destruction in the 1950s of the registration cards of reserve and rank and file personnel of the Red Army. That is, we do not know the real number of those mobilized during the Great Patriotic War, which makes it difficult to calculate real losses and identify the “missing” category among them.
Such different numbers
The results of a fundamental study by Krivosheev’s group of personnel losses of the USSR Armed Forces in combat for the period from 1918 to 1989 were published in the book “The Classification of Secrecy has been Removed. Losses of the Armed Forces in wars, hostilities and military conflicts.”
In particular, it says that during the years of the Great Patriotic War (including during the campaign in the Far East against Japan in 1945), the total irreversible demographic losses (killed, missing, captured and did not return from it, died from wounds, illnesses and as a result of accidents) the Soviet Armed Forces, together with border and internal troops, amounted to 8 million 668 thousand 400 people.
But there are researchers who bring the scale of Soviet losses to completely unimaginable levels. The most impressive figures are given by the writer and historian Boris Sokolov, who estimated the total number of deaths in the ranks of the USSR Armed Forces in 1941-1945 at 26.4 million people, with German losses on the Soviet-German front at 2.6 million (ratio 10: 1). In total, he counted 46 million Soviet citizens who died in the Great Patriotic War.
However, official science calls such calculations absurd, since during all the years of the war, taking into account the pre-war number of military personnel, no more than 34.5 million people were mobilized, of which about 27 million were direct participants in the war. Based on Sokolov’s statistics, Soviet Union finished off the enemy with only a few hundred thousand military personnel, which does not fit in with the realities of the war.
Those who did not return from the war
Krivosheev’s group conducted a statistical study of a large array of archival documents and other materials containing information about human losses in the army and navy, border and internal troops of the NKVD. Initially, the number of all irretrievable losses of soldiers and officers during the war was determined to be approximately 11.5 million people.
Later, 939.7 thousand military personnel were excluded from this number, recorded at the beginning of the war as missing in action, but re-called into the army in the territory liberated from occupation. The researchers also subtracted from their calculations 1 million 836 thousand former military personnel who returned from captivity after the end of the war.
After lengthy calculations and reconciliations with various sources, in particular, with reports from troops and data from repatriation authorities, the category of irretrievable losses reached the figure of 8 million 668 thousand 400 people. The commission estimated the number of missing and captured people at 3 million 396.4 thousand people.
It is known that in the first months of the war there were significant losses, the nature of which is not documented (information about them was collected subsequently, including from German archives). They amounted to 1 million 162.6 thousand people. Where should I take them? It was decided to address the military personnel who went missing and were captured. In the end it turned out to be 4 million 559 thousand people.
Russian publicist and journalist Leonid Radzikhovsky calls this figure overestimated and writes his own - 1 million 783 thousand 300 people. True, he does not include all prisoners in it, but only those who did not return home.
Yours or someone else's?
Many Soviet citizens ended up in the occupied territory of the USSR in the first months of the war. According to German sources, by May 1943, 70 thousand Soviet citizens, mostly prisoners of war, served in the Military Administration police and about 300 thousand in police teams. Only representatives of the Turkic and Caucasian nationalities in the German military formations numbered about 150 thousand people.
After the end of the war, some of the Soviet citizens who sided with the enemy were repatriated and excluded from the category of losses. But some of them went missing, having died or not wanting to return to their homeland. This is where the methodological problem that researchers face arises. If, at the time of being captured, Soviet military personnel were rightfully counted among our losses, then, consequently, after entering service in the German army and police, they can be credited to the enemy’s account? For now this is a debatable issue.
It is even more difficult to classify Soviet prisoners of war who have already been listed as missing, some of whom deliberately went over to the side of the Reich. Among them are about 100 thousand Latvians, 36 thousand Lithuanians and 10 thousand Estonians. Can they be considered irretrievable losses? Clarification of this issue will have a significant impact on the results of the missing persons count.
Return names
In January 2009, in St. Petersburg, at a meeting of the Russian organizing committee “Victory”, data on the number of missing people were announced by the President of the Russian Federation. Those who could not be found either among the killed or among the former prisoners of war turned out to be 2.4 million people. The names of 6 million soldiers out of 9.5 million located in the registered 47 thousand mass graves in our country and abroad also remain unknown.
It is curious that the data on the number of missing Soviet soldiers coincides with the number in the German army. In a German radio telegram emanating from the Wehrmacht casualty department dated May 22, 1945, the figure of 2.4 million people is noted opposite the “missing in action” category.
Many independent researchers believe that the real number of missing Soviet soldiers is significantly higher than the official one. This can be evidenced by an analysis of the Books of Memory, where approximately half of the citizens who were drafted into the Red Army and did not return from the war are marked as missing.
Candidate of Military Sciences Lev Lopukhovsky believes that the official data on the results of the work of Krivosheev’s group are underestimated by 5-6 million people. According to him, the commission did not take into account the huge category of militia soldiers who died, disappeared and were captured, and this is at least 4 million.
Lopukhovsky called for losses in the “missing” category to be compared with file data Central Archives Ministry of Defense. The number of missing sergeants and soldiers there alone exceeds 7 million people. The names of these servicemen are recorded in the reports of commanders of military units (1,720,951 people) and in the registration data of military registration and enlistment offices (5,435,311 people).
All this suggests that there is no more or less accurate figure reflecting the number of missing Soviet soldiers. Today, missing soldiers and officers, as well as military personnel who were not properly buried, but included in the losses, are the main object of activity for the Russian search movement. It should be noted that to date, Russian search teams have returned the names of approximately 28 thousand soldiers previously considered missing.
Not everyone returned from the front in 1945; the ancestors of many of us are still on the lists of missing persons. But we continue to look for those who gave their lives for us and gave us clear skies above our heads.
Memorial
Thanks to the document, you can find out when and where the WWII participant died, as well as the primary burial place and the place of reburial (if there is one).
Memory of the People
If your relative is listed as missing, you can search for information about his fate in the database of Soviet prisoners of war by Nazi Germany.
What I was able to find: by searching on Google “Myshbor station war” I was able to find information that Mikhail Vasilyevich Batukhtin fell in battle with German bombers on August 16, 1942 near the Myshbor railway station. From report No. 24967 on irretrievable losses dated September 22, 1942, we learn that 8 soldiers were killed during the bombing. All of them, including my great-grandfather, were buried here. Unfortunately, the mass grave could not be found on the Internet.
Maria Batukhtina
You tell me: “Why look?
Those who were killed here have long disappeared,
Those who could have been waiting for them have also left,
And all of them have long been forgotten..."
From the song of the search engines
Almost every family in our country has relatives who went missing during the Great Patriotic War. Some scattered information is kept in the family, some still have photographs. But when you see the name of a loved one in a report from the Memorial base, for example, for some reason you more clearly imagine a train under fire, trenches... And it seems that if you find out at least something else, your soldier will not be so lonely in his unknown grave. And you hope that the soldiers who have not returned will not be left without prayers.
Dmitry Aleksandrovich Belov, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Director of the Research Center for Regional History of the Volgograd State Academy of Postgraduate Education, Vice-President of the International Charitable Foundation, told Foma about where and how to look for information about the burial place of a soldier of the Great Patriotic War. Battle of Stalingrad».
STEP 1. WHERE TO START
Most quick way find your relative who died in the Great Patriotic War- this is a generalized data bank “Memorial”, the database of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense (TsAMO):
For this:
1. We go to the website of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, where the most complete electronic database in our country of those killed in the Second World War is located: www.obd-memorial.ru
2. Fill in the columns “Last name”, “First name”, “Patronymic name”, “Year of birth” of your deceased relative:
3. Ideally, we get a result of several lines with more or less complete information and continue to study the materials towards specifying the exact location of the burial.
4. In the surname or first name, or patronymic, we change the letters, selecting them in such a way as if they were written by an illiterate person or the original document is poorly readable and there are alternative reading options. And you may come across additional documents from the archive's database.
At this stage of the search, to begin with, a last name, first name, patronymic, year of birth, preferably a title is enough. If he is Ivanov Ivan Ivanovich, then, of course, it will be more difficult. You have to be persistent to make sure that this is exactly the person you need, you will need details - full name of wife, mother, name of the village, city where he was called up, place of birth (in accordance with the administrative-territorial division of the USSR in the pre-war years - approx. ed.).
It is worth paying special attention to the fourth point. There are some really stupid spelling mistakes in the database. My great-grandfather's name was Andrei Kirillovich. I wrote “Kirillovich” like a normal person with two letters, and then I thought that not everyone knows how to spell Kirillovich...
Kirillovich typed with one “l” and immediately found the burial place. Also Filippovich - maybe Filippovich, and with one “p”, and so on. It is also better to try to change the letters in the surname and first name in case they were written by an illiterate person or the original document is difficult to read. Such moments must be taken into account.
Ideally, the result of your search should be a document about the burial place of a relative and information in which military unit (army, division or regiment) he fought.
If there is no information, one can hope that the search teams that are looking for and burying the remains of soldiers will find something. If the search engines managed to find someone, they contact the military registration and enlistment office and look for relatives themselves.
But you can continue the search on your own. In this case, it is necessary to collect the maximum possible amount of information in order to begin a qualitatively new stage of the search.
What can help us with this?
STEP 2. COLLECT ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Have the letters survived?
The most important thing in letters is the number of the field postal station (FPS) on the stamp of the envelope. You can use it to determine the number of a division, regiment, etc.
A powerful resource: a lot of documents on military topics, memoirs, collections. If you know the division number and the battle area, then you can at least general outline find description.
Database "Feat of the People"
TsAMO project.
This is a database where there is information about soldiers awarded medals. The database is not complete yet, not all documents have been scanned yet.
This resource has several hospital databases. Dial the hospital number, press Enter and see which division it served.
And there are many more reference books on types of troops, shoulder straps, and weapons.
But the most valuable thing is on Soldat.ru forum http://soldat.ru/forum/
If you register on it, you can get advice from completely unfamiliar historians, specialists, anyone who is interested in searching, and military registration and enlistment office employees.
To register, at the top of this site (see the lower right corner in the picture above), you need to click the “Registration” button. Next you need to fill out the registration form.
Then create a topic (it’s better to name it briefly, for example, “No. rifle division. I'm looking for a relative." After this, your request will be able to be read by anyone who visits this site. Do not doubt! There will be enough such strangers and caring people. Everyone will help you with the information they have. Some will answer, advise, consult, others will recommend sites, scan the documents you need, excerpts from books, etc.
Other resources
There are many more resources that publish interviews with veterans and biographies. But it is worth considering that these sources, as a rule, do not represent historical value either for the researcher or for those who want to use this material in their search.
Now Russians have a much better chance of finding a relative missing on the battlefields than, for example, 20 years ago, when military-patriotic search organizations did not exist and state military archives were inaccessible. So, how exactly can you search for missing relatives or loved ones? You can begin your own investigation by searching military archives or using electronic databases.
Before you start searching
Collect as much information as possible about the person you want to find.
Any information will be useful:
Date and place of birth;
The place where the person was sent to serve is also important! - the place where he was drafted into the army and by which military registration and enlistment office he was drafted;
Military unit number;
Type of army;
Any notifications from the army, as well as any (even unofficial) notifications about possible capture;
Personal letters from the front, especially those that contain information about the number of a field post office or military unit.
This data can make it easier to search for data in archival documentation.
Electronic databases
1. The main resource of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, which has collected as much information as possible about the defenders of the Fatherland who died or went missing during the war and post-war period, is "United Data Bank "Memorial" .
Here, information from 38 archival files of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the Central Naval Archive, the Russian State Military Archive, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, regional archives of the Russian Archive and 42.2 thousand passports of existing military burial places in Russian Federation and beyond. On this site you can find out the burial place of a warrior and see a digitized record of a person from a file cabinet. This resource will also help you find medical workers and civilians who were at the front or were captured.
2. There are various unofficial archives collected by individuals or organizations. You can find many links to such databases on the Internet, but it should be remembered that archives not under the jurisdiction of the state cannot provide an official answer to the request. However, such sources of information can help in finding a person missing in war. For example, you can use the resource Soldat.ru or website “Combat actions of the Red Army in the Second World War” .
Russian archives
If you cannot find information about a missing relative via the Internet, you may be able to find the data yourself using specialized archives.
You can contact the Russian State military archive in Moscow or, if you don’t know exactly which state archive may contain the information you need, find your way according to the guidebook or archive list .
In addition, you can consult the following archives for information:
You can try to find archived data yourself, but you need to keep in mind that it is not as easy as it seems at first glance - the file cabinets are huge, you will have to search Required documents according to inventories, and this can take a lot of time. In addition, in order to enter the reading room, you will need to write an application in which you will need to indicate your passport details and the purpose of collecting information, as well as indicate which documents you may need.