There is probably no family in the entire territory of the post-Soviet space that was not affected by the Great Patriotic War. After all, at that terrible time our army suffered colossal losses. Some returned home and lived to old age. Others remained on the battlefield and to this day little is known about them. This article will be useful for those who continue to search for the names of their relatives in the books of memory of those killed and missing during the Second World War from 1941 to 1945.
How to search for missing WWII soldiers by last name on the Internet
There are many resources on the Internet that help people establish long-past events and determine the fate of warriors. Among them there are large projects, the data for which is provided by state archival services. Some sites are communities. Here, users join forces to search for the information they need much more efficiently. First of all, you definitely need to visit the OBD Memorial book of memory.
The website is located at https://obd-memorial.ru/html/. This is a general database containing more than 16 million profiles of participants in the Great War. Among them you can find those who died on the battlefield, died in hospitals from wounds, and went missing from 1941 to 1945. The questionnaires on the site provide all the data that is currently known about a person. The hero's orders, rank, military units in which the soldier served, the place and date of conscription, and the cities he visited are displayed.
For search:
If this search doesn't help you, try using the advanced form to add more details. You can open it in the form on the main page near the “Find” button.
Where else can you find information about soldiers from the Great Patriotic War?
Quite a lot of time has passed since the Great Patriotic War. But various kinds of military documents have still been preserved, which continue to be useful in searching. You need to know whether the wanted soldier has been promoted to rank. This information is especially useful. Since after receiving a junior lieutenant in training institutions, a special personal file of the soldier is immediately opened. All details are entered here. Information can also be obtained from Central archives of the Ministry of Defense.
In fact, any information that concerns the wanted soldier will be useful to you. If he was wounded on the battlefield, then these records are stored in the medical department of TsAMO. The wounded person’s medical records record the time of injury, in which hospital he was treated, from which military unit the employee was, and much more.
Perhaps the one you are looking for was captured by invaders. Knowing this information can greatly help your investigation. There is a database on prisoners of war on the website at http://www.dokst.ru/main/node/1118.
Online database of WWII prisoners of war
The database search is organized in the usual way:
- Start typing the person's last name or select the first letter of their last name.
- In the list, profiles immediately expand when clicked and provide information for viewing. The resource is a kind of book of memory of the dead and missing participants of the Second World War in the period 1941-1945.
Where to look for photos of WWII participants
Having information about your grandfather, a WWII participant, you can try to find a photograph of him from the time of the war. The website https://foto.pamyat-naroda.ru/ has a photo archive that contains a large number of images of front-line soldiers. Use the search bar on the main page via the link and enter the hero’s first and last name.
Search for photos of WWII participants
Perhaps it is in this virtual memory book that you will find his image or additional information.
The site provides the opportunity to download and post photographs of WWII participants on its pages. To do this you need to click on the big button on the left " Add a hero...» and fill out the detailed form on the next page.
Adding a photo of a WWII hero to the site
Photos are carefully checked by site moderators. If the uploaded image does not meet the parameters or photo posting rules, it will be rejected. To view them, scroll down the form page and click on the appropriate link.
“Memory of the People” - a book of memory of those killed from 1941 to 1945
"" is another large online portal for searching for participants in the Great Patriotic War, created on behalf of the President of the Russian Federation. It stores military documents, more than 100,000 maps of troop movements in 1941-1945. Each visitor can find out the time and place of conscription, places of death of soldiers and other information.
There is no need to register on the site to search:
The website has an online map of the movement of Soviet troops in 1941-1945. The military battles of that time are displayed here.
Map of military battles 1941-1945.
At the top of the map is a timeline. By setting the date, you can see offensive operations and settlements where battles were fought. As well as military units and each participant. Under the map you can find the original attack plan for a particular battle.
Additional sources for searching for missing persons
To find your relatives who fought for their homeland in World War II, other equally useful sources will help you. You can find various reference books on the website http://soldat.ru/spravka/. For example, a directory of military units or a directory " Liberated cities" In the site menu you can find a forum, documents, bulletin boards on military topics, which will also be useful in your investigation.
Directories on the events of the Great Patriotic War
A large number of soldiers fought in the Second World War on the territory of Soviet Ukraine. There is a separate portal for Ukrainians who lost loved ones in the war. In the book of memory of those killed and missing in the Second World War https://memory-book.ua/ you can try to find people if you have at least some information about them. It’s not just Ukrainians who are being looked for here. After all, these lands were defended by other peoples. On the website you can see maps of mass graves. Each icon indicates the number of warriors. And by selecting one of the graves on the map, you can get detailed information about where the monument is located and the names of the people.
You can establish some of the events of those years by reading the military literature on the website http://militera.lib.ru/. This resource is entirely dedicated to diaries, biographies, military history and military letters. There is literature here not only on the topic of the Second World War.
Another useful resource for searching by last name is located at http://rf-poisk.ru/page/34/. This is a book of memory of those killed and missing during the Second World War in the period from 1941 to 1945. This resource is useful because it contains links to books of memory for the regions of Russia. Open the home page and select the desired link.
The Great Patriotic War took, according to various estimates, from several million to tens of millions of lives. A huge percentage of WWII participants are considered missing. With the help of the Internet, it has become possible to trace the combat path of soldiers in order to find them and immortalize their exploits.
The entire Soviet people took part in the Great Patriotic War - from an ordinary working person to the famous artist Yuri Nikulin - the participants of the Second World War, no matter who they were, brought the great Victory of the USSR over Germany and its allies.
Of the tens of millions of WWII participants, less than half returned alive.
The Great Patriotic War took a large number of lives - the Soviet people suffered the greatest losses, because it was they who bore the brunt of the German military machine. And although foreign sources deny this, it is precisely Soviet Union made a key contribution to the victory over Nazism and fascism. The death toll still cannot be calculated accurately.
Many families want to find out whether their loved one is on the list of WWII participants and what fate befell him during the fighting.
Nowadays, searching for WWII participants is still a difficult task. Despite the fact that the World Wide Web has made it possible to work with databases much faster, many documents remain lost. It is worth noting that there are many such resources (sites for searching for the dead, missing and veterans) and they are all in the public domain - anyone can visit the electronic database and try to find their loved one.
Since many of the WWII participants are considered missing, their bodies are still being found. Monuments to WWII participants are erected at the expense of the state - the organization of funerals also falls on the shoulders of special authorities Russian Federation and other CIS countries.
The search for dead WWII participants began on a large scale relatively recently - in the early 2000s. Historians began to actively close the dark pages of history, and there was a desire to perpetuate the memory of the participants in the Great War. The Internet played perhaps a key role in this. It made it possible to create electronic databases that are much easier to work with than archives.
At the same time, organizations such as the “Immortal Regiment” began to emerge, and many websites opened that were easy to work with – just know the basic information about the WWII participant. Knowing the name of a WWII participant, a person has a high probability of finding the dead or missing.
Losses in the Great Patriotic War
According to various sources, USSR losses range from 7 to more than 40 million people. At the same time, the number of missing people remains extremely high even this year.
The figure of 7 million is cited by domestic historians, while foreign historians believe that the real losses are hushed up and the death toll is much more catastrophic - about 40 million people, including civilians.
The official death toll in the war was constantly changing. For example, Stalin called 7 million people, while under Khrushchev a much more catastrophic figure was called - 20 million.
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, estimates of 7 and 20 million victims were constantly criticized. According to documents, in the first year of the war alone, when the Red Army suffered one defeat after another and fell into cauldrons, losses amounted to more than 3 million - and that’s just the military. Another example - Battle of Stalingrad. About 1.2 million military personnel died in it alone—these are those who were found. There were also bloody battles near Moscow, Leningrad, the Battle of Kursk, the storming of Berlin, and so on. Many are still considered missing.
It is also difficult to calculate losses due to the fact that many WWII participants died in German captivity. Terrible conditions, constant executions, hard work and meager rations led to the fact that only a small percentage of prisoners managed to return to their homeland. The Germans have been burning documentation relating to atrocities in concentration camps in recent months in an attempt to hide information from the world, and therefore this data is considered irretrievably lost.
It is still impossible to accurately determine the number of victims, since historians do not have access to all the documentation. During the fighting, recruitment into the army was so chaotic that mistakes were often made in the names and surnames of recruits, which seriously complicates the work with documents. Some of the papers were lost or destroyed during the fighting and retreat of the Red Army forces in the first years of the war.
Documents from the second period of the Great Patriotic War have been preserved in a larger percentage. The largest part of the missing are soldiers of the Red Army who tried to hold back the enemy's advance in the first years of the war. The years 1941-1942 were extremely difficult for Soviet republics(USSR) and searching for the names of WWII participants of this period is most difficult. Young men and old men were called up to the military registration and enlistment offices - many simply did not have time to enroll and were immediately sent to the front, since the enemy was inexorably advancing and there was a catastrophic shortage of people.
A huge number of bodies have yet to be found, and families want to find their relatives so they can be given a proper burial.
To do this, you can use a site like "Memory of the People" is a powerful online resource that searches for WWII participants by last name.
Home page of the website “Memory of the People”
On the People's Memory website you can search for awarded people by last name and first name - a huge database that has been collected over the years will help with this. On the site you can also search for WWII participants who returned from the war to be sure that the person survived the fighting.
In addition, this resource also helps to find out the burial places of soldiers, obtain information about losses in a particular battle, and find information about the service of a Red Army soldier. The situation is more complicated with the rear workers, who also played a big role in the victory over Germany - there are much fewer similar resources for finding them, as well as documents with the data of these people.
There are many queries on the Internet: “I’m looking for a WWII participant,” “where can I find a veteran by last name?” In this article you will learn about all the ways to find missing relatives.
How to find a participant in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 by last name
Such popular sites as:
- http://www.obd-memorial.ru – allows you to find useful information about combatants who died or went missing;
- http://www.moypolk.ru - allows you to find information not only about soldiers, but also who worked in the rear, children of the war, and were in the ranks of the partisans;
- http://www.podvignaroda.ru - opens access to lists of decorated combatants;
- http://www.pamyat-naroda.ru is one of the largest Internet resources, which is supported by the Ministry of Defense and provides access to all found documents from the period of the Great Patriotic War;
- http://www.dokst.ru – a list of prisoners of war who died while being captured by the Germans and many others (alas, all the names of those killed are not in the database).
On the above-mentioned resources, you just need to enter the name of interest, and the search engine will give you all the relevant results.
A valuable source in the search for dead WWII participants are funeral- This is a document that is a notification of the death of a serviceman. These documents can also be found on the above-mentioned sites.
If you have information about awards, this will greatly simplify your search, as you can access lists of awardees and try to find the name you need there.
A thorough analysis of official sources in state archives will make it possible to find grandfathers and great-grandfathers who participated in the Second World War, although this procedure takes a lot of time.
Archive of the Ministry of Defense: search by last name of WWII participants
The military registration and enlistment office is the place where a WWII participant could be noted for the last time, and therefore their archives are also important - they should contain valuable information, including dates of birth, registration, surname, place of military service.
The archives of the military unit and naval academy are no less important sources. The archives of such institutions may also contain valuable information about WWII participants.
Central Archive your city is a must-see for those who want to find their missing relative who participated in the Second World War of 1941-1945. Anyone can visit it, because now all the archives of the USSR are in the public domain.
WWII awards: search by last name
A website was created specifically for searching by last name in archives awarded during and as a result of hostilities "Feat of the people". It is not difficult to find out about awards given to WWII participants, because all lists are publicly available.
Home page of the website “Feat of the People”
“Feat of the People” is a huge data repository where all combatants who distinguished themselves in battle with the enemy are collected. Consequently, if your relative who took part in hostilities received some kind of award, he was entered into the “Feat of the People” database.
In the catalog of orders and medals you can find veterans, dead and disabled people who were awarded the “Red Star”, a list of participants in the battle (battle) for Moscow, and so on.
Unfortunately, there is no 100% guarantee that you will find your loved one, since too many documents were lost during the war and for a long time no one searched for the missing.
If you cannot find information on websites, you need to visit the archives of the regions where the person you are looking for was born. For example, if he was born in the Republic of Bashkortostan, then you need to visit the local archives, which contain a list of WWII participants born in this region.
The situation is somewhat more complicated with those killed abroad. For example, if a WWII participant died in Belarus (Belarus), you need to go to the embassy so that they can open access to archives in that country.
The “Feat of the People” website is supported by the Ministry of Defense. Their goal is to perpetuate the memory of all the heroes of the great war, regardless of what rank they were in and what scale of feat they performed. An equally important goal is the patriotic education of young people against the backdrop of the exploits of their grandfathers.
The main source of information is archival documents that are digitized and entered into the database.
Speaking in numbers, on the “Feat of the People” website there is:
- more than thirty million records of awards of orders and medals “For Military Merit” and “For Courage”;
- more than twenty million records of awards of the Order of the Great Patriotic War, I and II degrees, which were awarded on the fortieth anniversary of the Victory;
- one hundred million sheets, which in total amount to more than two hundred thousand archival files.
There are three search options available on the “Feat of the People” website, including:
- search for decrees and orders on awards;
- searching for people and their rewards;
- search for data by place and time.
On the website “Feat of the People” you can see lists of people and their awards, study real award lists of WWII participants, which are a valuable source of information. The award documents are publicly available and there should be no problems working with them - the main thing is to be patient.
On the “Feat of the People” website you can also find an anniversary card index of awards for WWII participants - it contains all the names and surnames of the soldiers who received anniversary awards on the 40th anniversary of the Great Victory. It describes extensive information about the participants of the Second World War, including their dates and places of birth, and other valuable data.
Also here you can see the movements of armies and military units, which makes it possible to trace the combat path of a WWII participant.
The “Feat of the People” website, unfortunately, has one drawback - it will be useless for those who are looking for information about combatants who went missing, but for this there are other Internet resources, which were also discussed in the article.
WWII veterans: search by last name
Missing people, veterans, dead and heroes of the Great Patriotic War can be found using regional, regional and city directories.
Significant assistance in searching for living veterans, those who have already died, or those killed as a result of hostilities is provided by the popular Internet site http://moypolk.ru/, which is supported by the all-Russian campaign “Immortal Regiment”, the work of which has only recently gained momentum.
Do not forget to visit the archives of those cities in which the veteran was first born or where he served. For example, if he was born in the Tsivilsky district, look at the lists of participants in the local regional archives.
Immortal Regiment of Russia
“Immortal Regiment” is a large-scale social movement whose goal is to preserve personal information about participants, witnesses of the Great Patriotic War, home front workers, workers in factories producing military equipment and ammunition, and so on.
The “Immortal Regiment” was created in Russia - in the city of Tomsk, by three activists: Igor Dmitriev, Sergei Kolotovkin and Sergei Lapenkov.
Initially, the scale of the movement was small, but now it operates in eighty countries around the world.
All the initiators of the movement are journalists who came up with the idea of creating the “Immortal Regiment” after they began to notice every year that fewer and fewer veterans were coming to the parade dedicated to Victory Day.
During the first march (occurred in 2012) in Tomsk, more than five thousand people took to the streets of the city, carrying posters with photos of their relatives who fought in the Great Patriotic War.
The first procession of the “Immortal Regiment” in 2012 in the city of Tomsk
This action was immediately covered in the media and began to rapidly gain momentum throughout the country and beyond.
The main logo of the movement was the crane bird. The creators of the logo were primarily inspired by the song “Cranes,” which is dedicated to soldiers who died during the fighting.
The Immortal Regiment logo is a crane.
On the official website of the “Immortal Regiment” http://moypolk.ru/, anyone can independently determine the fate of their loved ones who died during the fighting in the Great Patriotic War or went missing. Every month, thanks to the site, people manage to find dozens of dead heroes who brought us victory over Nazism.
Database of those killed in the Second World War
One of the largest databases on the Internet on those killed during hostilities, in the post-war period, as well as on missing persons is located on the website https://obd-memorial.ru/html/
OBD "Memorial" offers an advanced search for WWII participants by last name. In it, you initially need to enter the last name, then the first name or initials of the soldier.
Archival data of participants in the Second World War 1941-1945 is in the public domain, and therefore you can be sure that if information about the person you are interested in exists, you will definitely find it on this site.
Victory in the Great War over the Germans and their allies came at a high price - millions died, hundreds of thousands simply disappeared, but their memory should not be forgotten.
Activists continue to search for burial places of soldiers. The President of the Russian Federation fully supports the work of such organizations like the Immortal Regiment, having issued special Decrees and instructions.
With the help of the Memorial website, millions of people can find the burial places of their loved ones who died at the hands of the enemy. A large-scale campaign was carried out to create this resource. As a result, we have gained access to an information and reference system of truly global importance, which simply has no analogues in world practice.
Winners: Soldiers of the Great War
A project was created for the 60th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War "Winners", which aims to once again recall and perpetuate the feat of the Great War.
Every year the number of veterans decreases - these people leave. Many even began to forget the last time they saw a veteran of the Great Patriotic War.
On the 60th anniversary of the victory over the Germans, the organizers of the “Winners” project were able to create a list of more than one million veterans who still live with us and should never be forgotten.
Participants in the “Winners” movement believe that no matter how assessments change and how history is interpreted, the feat of our grandfathers and grandmothers should never be forgotten. And the day of May 9 should remain the Day of the Great Victory over the Nazis.
The names of those who fought in the Second World War should always remain in the memory of all generations to whom the participants in the hostilities gave a peaceful life.
Great assistance in collecting the names of veterans was provided, first of all, by the presidential administration, which helped find more than one million heroes. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation also provided lists of WWII veterans who retired - there were more than one hundred thousand winners on the lists.
In the very first days, the creators of the site began to receive letters in which relatives of combatants wrote that they had found their loved one on the site, who was considered dead.
Regardless of where your loved one served during the Second World War - in the NKVD troops or as an ordinary ordinary soldier in the Red Army, if he is on the list of veterans we have collected, you will be able to find him.
It would seem difficult not to find a loved one for sixty years. However, at that time there was a catastrophe in the country on a global scale and many were unable to get to their home, especially if it was completely destroyed by the Germans.
At the moment, the site is functioning to the best of its capabilities - the creators of the project, unfortunately, do not have the current addresses of veterans of the Great Patriotic War.
The creators of the site believe that the Internet provides new opportunities to tell the younger generation what this Great War was like for our grandfathers and grandmothers, who shed blood for their Motherland and loved ones.
The “Winners” website has a special multimedia map of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, which will allow you to learn in detail about the course of hostilities, the movements of armies, and so on.
The managers of the site considered it necessary not to delete the names of already deceased veterans - they celebrated the 60th anniversary of the victory and always remain alive. Therefore, on the site you will not see the dates of death of veterans.
Find a soldier - a reminder for those who are looking for their heroes
The Immortal Regiment organization decided to provide assistance to those people who are just trying for the first time to find their loved ones who fought in the Great Patriotic War.
Domestic archives, as well as foreign ones, the official website of the Ministry of Defense, special Internet resources - they are your best assistant in finding war participants.
In a special memo "Find a Soldier" they talked about ways to find veterans that are currently relevant and will help you find your loved one.
The search procedure is as follows:
- Visit the Memorial website at the following address: http://obd-memorial.ru. To try to find a person, you need to open the “advanced search” tab. Initially, it is advised to enter only the person’s last name, then you can add the first name and other data. In addition, try to write the last name in full, and write the first and middle names with initials.
- Travel to the Russian State Archives.
- Contact the Russian Ministry of Defense for help by sending a request to provide information about a participant in hostilities. To do this, you need to fill out a letter and send it to the following address: “Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation,” Kirova Street 74, Podolsk, Moscow Region, 142100. You must state your request in as much detail as possible in the letter, provide all available information and enclose it in the letter a blank envelope with your home address.
- Look for information about your loved one on the Feat of the People website. At the following address: http://podvignaroda.mil.ru, you can see if the person you are looking for is on the list of awarded veterans. If you only know your first and last name, then you should go to the “People and Awards” tab - the search engine will give you all the relevant results.
- This point will help you if you are absolutely sure that your relative who participated in the hostilities is buried outside. There are several ways to find a relative: contact the embassy of the Russian Federation in a particular country, or find help in the Russian House of EU member states.
- The popular Russian website “Soldat.ru” talks about many other ways in which you can find your relative: send a questionnaire to the International Red Cross tracing service, make socio-legal inquiries to the archives, visit a database of Internet links to school museums in Russian Federation, which may contain exhibitions about the combat routes of formations and units of the Soviet Army.
If such search options have not brought you success, visit the website http://soldat.ru - there you will find a lot more tools for work and, perhaps, one of them will help you find the person you have been looking for for decades.
Website "Soldier"
If you know the initials, full name, surname, or at least patronymic, finding the burial place of a WWII participant is much easier.
Book of Memory
"Book of Memory"- another online project that was created specifically to perpetuate the memory of the exploits of Red Army soldiers, home front workers and partisans who fought in the Great Patriotic War.
In addition, the “Book of Memory” project provides significant assistance to search teams, allowing them to consult printed volumes regarding the information they contain about KA (Red Army) soldiers.
The “Book of Memory” project is global in nature - many countries have their own books, for example, Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In addition, individual regions also create “Books of Memory” - educational institutions such as schools also do the same, and it does not matter where they are located - in a village or a city.
Now the “Book of Memory” project is fully supported by the “Immortal Regiment”. At the moment, the project is actively developing - the society actively supports search work and favors the creation of printed publications with stories of eyewitnesses, victims and veterans of the Great Patriotic War.
“Book of Memory” of the Kaliningrad region
The electronic memory book is constantly updated with new stories and names, revealing to the younger generation more and more details of life during the Great War with the Germans and their allies.
The electronic version of the “Book of Memory” of Russia can be found at http://narkompoisk.ru
Immortal Regiment
As already mentioned, officially "Immortal Regiment" was created on the territory of the Russian Federation in city of Tomsk. And although the movement was initiated in 2011, it has officially existed since 2014.
Before the “Immortal Regiment,” other movements arose, but none of them received such significant support from society wishing to perpetuate the memory of the participants in the Great Patriotic War.
In 2012 there are already fifteen large cities in Russia decided to organize a procession of people on Victory Day with posters of photos of participants in the hostilities.
In 2013 Russia has already been joined by countries such as Ukraine, Israel and Kazakhstan. These states also suffered greatly during the fighting of 1941-1945, as well as from repression by Nazi Germany.
In 2014 the number of cities supporting the Immortal Regiment movement has increased up to five hundred, and the number of countries is now seven. Due to the growing popularity of the movement, its organizers created their own website - on it, every relative of a combatant can try to find a deceased, missing person or veteran.
In 2015 The Immortal Regiment has already passed in seventeen countries around the world and covered more than a thousand cities.
In 2016 there was an incredible surge in the popularity of the “Immortal Regiment” - people joined the action forty-two countries.
On the official website of the “Immortal Regiment”, as of 2016, more than 350 thousand stories were published. It is interesting that not only the stories of combatants are published here, but also those who spent the war in German captivity and provided the work of the rear. A special place is given to the stories of children of the war, for whom it was no less difficult than for adults.
“Immortal Regiment” calls on everyone to help promote the organization, because it pursues noble goals - to help find relatives who died during the fighting, living veterans and perpetuate the exploits of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War.
In 2015, when the country celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Victory, The President of the Russian Federation took part in the procession of the “Immortal Regiment” - Vladimir Putin, which provides significant support to the movement.
It is currently impossible to establish all the names of the participants in the Second World War of 1941-1945, but the help of the “Immortal Regiment” from everyone who cares will help us get closer to this number.
Thanks to the above-mentioned resources, grandfathers and grandmothers were found who were participants in the Second World War and who had long been considered dead. Tens of thousands of families were able to find the bodies of dead and missing relatives in order to bury them with dignity and perpetuate their memory.
Everyone who fought in the Second World War should be known, everyone should know their names.
Today's development modern technologies has taken a step forward and you can find any information. Every resident of Russia can use the official website to learn about the participants of the Second World War, the period 1941-1945. Therefore, answering the question of how to find WWII participants by last name is not so difficult; this will be described below.
WWII participant, find by last name - official website
Today, special resources have been created, thanks to which you can find missing soldiers and war veterans who are still alive. It is worth noting that this useful resources which many people use. Today, several sites have been created, but reliable information should be taken from the official one. https://www.obd-memorial.ru. It’s easy to work with; you just need to fill out the fields that are presented on the start page. On them you can get acquainted with extracts and documents that were relevant about seventy years ago.
To find a specific person, you should set up filters. The information that is needed is the full name, if there are other data, then thanks to them you can find the desired person faster. You can indicate years of service, military awards, orders and relatives of the veteran. If you were unable to identify necessary information- then this is not a reason for frustration. You can try your own after a while. Data on the sites is updated regularly. You can try to find a person using search sites like Yandex.
It is worth noting that the data on the site is filled out by volunteers who conduct excavations at war sites. Everything that they find in the margins relating to the war, the period 1941-1945, is published on this portal. The sites can be replenished by people and social services that work with the elderly. Often war veterans share facts from their lives with their interlocutors. And war is such a period of life that sinks into the soul of an old man for a long time.
Find awards of a WWII participant by last name
Several years ago, a resource appeared on the Internet, thanks to which you can find awards received by participants in the war. This resource stores documents in electronic format that confirm the awards of people who took part in the war. All data is publicly available and anyone can view it. There is information taken from the archives.
The purpose of creating this project is to preserve the memory of each of the heroes of the Victory. There are only facts and no false information. It was recently determined that the resource contains more than twelve million award information. To find out if your relative has been awarded, you need to enter his initials in the Award Search column. If no information is found, you can subscribe to updates that will be sent to you by email.
Find a relative of a WWII participant by last name
To date, no such resource has yet been invented where one could find out about the relatives of war participants. But over time it is planned to create it too. Although on the official website, where you can find participants in the war, information about his relatives may also appear, if it was known earlier. Also on this site you can independently indicate your relationship with a war veteran. Only this needs to be supported by some documents, you need to prove your family connection with a veteran.
But if there is such a need to find relatives of war veterans, then you can contact the military registration and enlistment office and raise the entire archive of documents that should contain the information you are interested in.
How to find WWII participants
The question of how to find a WWII participant by last name is not uncommon today. But the answer to it will be formulated below. Lately, people have been interested in the participants in the war, prompted by the seventieth anniversary of victory, which does not leave a single veteran unattended. There is a good database of WWII participants on the database "Memorial" Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, which is freely available, that is, anyone can use it. You can fill out a questionnaire about a WWII participant if he is your relative, but the knowledge must be reliable.
To find a member Great War, you can contact the military registration and enlistment office that called the person to serve. You will need to write a statement stating that you are a relative and want to find out about the fate of the person or talk about him. After some time, your proposal will be considered and you will be contacted.
If you were unable to search for your relative, you can contact the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense, which is located in the city of Podolsk. You don’t have to go there in person; you can write a letter so that they can tell you about your missing relative. After some time, you should receive an official response, which will indicate either the place of burial or the place of residence of the person.
If a war participant died from combat wounds or died in captivity, then in order to find out as many facts about him as possible, you need to write a letter to the FSB, who can search the archives for information about the person.
How to find war participants using a television program?
Many people are looking for people who went missing on the battlefields to find out whether they are alive or not. And there are a lot of ways to do this. You can use specially created search sites, broadcasts, some associations and groups on social networks, archives and other places. Every year there are fewer and fewer unmarked graves or veterans who were unable to find their relatives. Therefore, the state is doing everything so that the participants of the Second World War find their relatives, and the whole country is proud of them.
Programs that search for missing people have recently gained wide popularity, especially those about program "Wait for me" where War Veterans are often found. After all, many veterans watch this program in the hope of finding their relatives and colleagues. This television project searches for missing people not only in Russia, but also in other countries, which increases the chances of finding the missing person. You can write a letter to the studio if you cannot come in person. You must include a description of the person and a photograph, if available, with your description.
In this article, we looked at how to find WWII participants by last name, what methods and sites there are for this. But in reality this will not be so easy. You may have to use several methods at once to find out about your missing relative.
Video about search methods
We have been keeping the memory of the Great War of the 20th century and its heroes for more than 70 years. We pass it on to our children and grandchildren, trying not to lose a single fact or surname. Almost every family was affected by this event; many fathers, brothers, husbands never returned. Today we can find information about them thanks to the painstaking work of military archives staff and volunteers who devote their free time to searching for soldiers’ graves. How to do this, how to find a WWII participant by last name, information about his awards, military ranks, place of death? We could not ignore such an important topic, we hope that we can help those who are looking and want to find.
Losses in the Great Patriotic War
It is still unknown exactly how many people left us during this great human tragedy. After all, the counting did not begin immediately; only in 1980, with the advent of glasnost in the USSR, historians, politicians, and archive staff were able to begin official work. Until this time, scattered data that were beneficial at that time were received.
- After celebrating Victory Day in 1945, J.V. Stalin said that we had buried 7 million Soviet citizens. He spoke, in his opinion, about everyone, both about those who died during the battle and about those who were taken prisoner by the German occupiers. But he missed a lot, did not say about the rear employees who stood at the machine from morning until night, falling dead from exhaustion. I forgot about the sentenced saboteurs, traitors to the motherland, ordinary residents and siege survivors of Leningrad who died in small villages; missing persons. Unfortunately, they can be listed for a long time.
- Later L.I. Brezhnev provided different information, he reported 20 million dead.
Today, thanks to the decoding of secret documents and search work, the numbers are becoming real. Thus, you can see the following picture:
- Combat losses received directly at the front during battles amount to about 8,860,400 people.
- Non-combat losses (from illnesses, wounds, accidents) - 6,885,100 people.
However, these figures do not yet correspond to complete reality. War, and even this kind of war, is not only the destruction of the enemy at the cost of one’s own life. These are broken families - unborn children. This is a huge loss of the male population, thanks to which it will not soon be possible to restore the balance necessary for good demography.
These are diseases, hunger in the post-war years and death from it. This is rebuilding the country again, again in many ways, at the cost of people’s lives. All of them also need to be taken into account when doing calculations. All of them are victims of terrible human vanity, whose name is war.
How to find a participant in the Great Patriotic War 1941 - 1945 by last name?
No better memory stars of victory than the desire of the future generation to know. The desire to save information for others, to avoid such repetition. How to find a WWII participant by last name, where to find possible information about grandfathers and great-grandfathers, fathers who took part in battles, knowing their last name? Especially for this purpose, there are now electronic repositories that everyone can access.
- obd-memorial.ru - here contains official data containing reports of units about losses, funerals, trophy cards, as well as information about rank, status (died, was killed or disappeared, where), scanned documents.
- moypolk.ru is a unique resource containing information about home front workers. The very ones without whom we would not have heard the important word “Victory”. Thanks to this site, many have already been able to find or help find lost people.
The work of these resources is not only to search for great people, but also to collect information about them. If you have any, please report it to the administrators of these sites. In this way, we will do a great common cause - we will preserve memory and history.
Archive of the Ministry of Defense: search by last name of WWII participants
Another one is the main, central, largest project - https://archive.mil.ru/. The documents preserved there are mostly isolated and remained intact due to the fact that they were taken to the Orenburg region.
Over the years of work, CA staff have created an excellent reference apparatus showing the contents of archival accumulations and funds. Now its goal is to provide people with access to possible documents through electronic computing technology. Thus, a website has been launched where you can try to find a military man who participated in the Second World War, knowing his last name. How to do it?
- On the left side of the screen, find the “memory of the people” tab.
- Indicate his full name.
- The program will give you the available information: date of birth, awards, scanned documents. Everything that is in the files for a given person.
- You can set a filter on the right, selecting only the sources you want. But it's better to choose everything.
- On this site it is possible to look at military operations on a map and the path of the unit in which the hero served.
This is a unique project in its essence. There is no longer such a volume of data collected and digitized from all existing and available sources: card indexes, electronic memory books, medical battalion documents and command directories. In truth, as long as such programs and the people who provide them exist, the memory of the people will be eternal.
If you don't find it there the right person, do not despair, there are other sources, they may not be as large-scale, but this does not make them less informative. Who knows in which folder the information you need might be lying around.
Participants of the Second World War: search by last name, archive and awards
Where else can you look? There are more narrowly focused repositories, for example:
- dokst.ru. As we said, those who were captured also became victims of this terrible war. Their fate may be displayed on foreign websites like this one. Here in the database there is everything about Russian prisoners of war and the burials of Soviet citizens. You only need to know the last name, you can look at the lists of captured people. The Documentation Research Center is located in the city of Dresden, and it was he who organized this site to help people from all over the world. You can not only search the site, but also send a request through it.
- Rosarkhiv archives.ru is an agency that is an executive authority that keeps records of all government documents. Here you can make a request either online or by phone. A sample electronic appeal is available on the website in the “appeals” section, left column on the page. Some services here are provided for a fee; a list of them can be found in the “archive activities” section. With this in mind, be sure to ask whether you will need to pay for your request.
- rgavmf.ru - military directory navy about the destinies and great deeds of our sailors. In the “orders and applications” section there is an email address for processing documents left for storage after 1941. By contacting the archive staff, you can get any information and find out the cost of such a service; most likely it is free.
WWII awards: search by last name
To search for awards and feats, an open portal has been organized, dedicated specifically to this www.podvignaroda.ru. Information is published here about 6 million cases of awards, as well as 500,000 unawarded medals and orders that never reached the recipient. Knowing the name of your hero, you can find a lot of new things about his fate. The posted scanned documents of orders and award sheets, data from registration files, will complement your existing knowledge.
Who else can I contact for information about awards?
- On the website of the Central Election Commission of the Ministry of Defense, in the section “Awards are looking for their heroes”, a list of awarded soldiers who did not receive them was published. Additional names can be obtained by phone.
- rkka.ru/ihandbook.htm - encyclopedia of the Red Army. It published some lists of conferring higher officer ranks, special ranks. The information may not be as extensive, but existing sources should not be neglected.
- https://www.warheroes.ru/ is a project created with the aim of popularizing the exploits of the defenders of the Fatherland.
A lot of useful information, which sometimes is not found anywhere, can be found on the forums of the above sites. Here people share valuable experiences and tell their own stories that can help you too. There are many enthusiasts who are ready to help everyone in one way or another. They create their own archives, conduct their own research, and can also be found only on forums. Don't shy away from this type of search.
WWII veterans: search by last name
- oldgazette.ru is an interesting project created by ideological people. A person who wants to find information enters data, it can be anything: full name, name of awards and date of receipt, line from a document, description of an event. This combination of words will be calculated by search engines, but not just on websites, but in old newspapers. Based on the results, you will see everything that was found. Maybe this is where you will be lucky, you will find at least a thread.
- It happens that we search among the dead and find among the living. After all, many returned home, but due to the circumstances of that difficult time, they changed their place of residence. To find them, use the website pobediteli.ru. This is where people searching send letters asking for help in finding their fellow soldiers, random encounters during the war. The project's capabilities allow you to select a person by name and region, even if he lives abroad. If you see it on these lists or similar, you need to contact the administration and discuss this issue. Kind, attentive staff will definitely help and do everything they can. The project does not interact with government organizations and cannot provide personal information: telephone number, address. But it is quite possible to publish your search request. More than 1,000 people have already been able to find each other this way.
- 1941-1945.at Veterans do not abandon their own. Here on the forum you can communicate, make inquiries among the veterans themselves, perhaps they have met and have information about the person you need.
The search for the living is no less relevant than the search for dead heroes. Who else will tell us the truth about those events, about what they experienced and suffered. About how they greeted victory, the very first, the most expensive, sad and happy at the same time.
Additional sources
Regional archives were created throughout the country. Not so large, held up, often on the shoulders ordinary people, they preserved unique single records. Their addresses are on the website of the movement to perpetuate the memory of the victims. And:
- https://www.1942.ru/ - “Seeker”.
- https://iremember.ru/ - memories, letters, archives.
- https://www.biograph-soldat.ru/ - international biographical center.
Many people whose relatives were participants in the Great Patriotic War still do not know about the fate of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. To perpetuate the memory of all participants in the war and provide information about the place of their burial to relatives and friends, the Memorial website was launched in 2007.
This site was developed under the guidance of the Ministry of Defense. Over the 10 years of the existence of the Memorial archive, there are about 17 million digital copies of documents about irretrievable losses, as well as about 20 million personal records about the losses of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War. The primary burial places of more than 5 million soldiers and officers have been made public.
If you need to find your relatives, then use the website www.obd-memorial.ru, which contains an archive of participants in the Great Patriotic War (WWII). Using the archive of the Ministry of Defense, you can search by the last name of WWII participants.
By going to the Memorial website, you can begin searching for a participant in the Great Patriotic War. To do this, on the main page of the site, use the “Set Fates” tab. To start a search by last name, you need to indicate the following information in the empty fields: last name, first name, patronymic, year of birth, rank. If you cannot fill in one of the fields, then you can leave the field blank.
Set destinies After filling out the fields and conducting a search, the computer will give you search results.
If nothing was found according to your request, then you can use the advanced search. During an advanced search, it is possible to set the following search parameters: full name, last name in Latin, date of birth, place of birth, date and place of recruitment, last place of service, military rank, camp number, date of departure, country of burial, region of burial, place of burial, place of departure, hospital from which he was reburied, place of captivity, date of death. It is also possible to specify the lists in which to search first.
Advanced Search
If you still haven’t been able to find anyone, don’t despair. Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the participants of the Great Patriotic War is updated annually with new entries. Therefore, it is possible that in a year or two you will be able to establish the fate of your relative who was a participant in the Great Patriotic War.
Archive of WWII participants