Search by last name 1941 1945. How to find a WWII veteran by first and last name? Review of useful resources on the Internet. Awards and exploits
With the help of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, an electronic bank “Feat of the People in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945” was created. which is located at podvignaroda.mil.ru, where you can find information about the exploits and awards of your fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers by first and last name. The search takes place using military archival documents that have been digitized and entered into the site database.
How and where to look?
The “Feat of the People” website is the most complete and up-to-date database on participants in the Great Patriotic War - there is information about almost all soldiers. At the first stage of digitization from 2010 to 2015, 30 million records were made on the awarding of orders and medals “For Courage” and “For Military Merit”, as well as information on 22 million Orders of the Patriotic War I and II degrees for the 40th anniversary of the Victory, and also 200 thousand archival files with a total volume of 100 million sheets!
Such a huge amount of work was done for the main goal of the project:
The main goals of the project are to perpetuate the memory of all heroes of the Victory, regardless of rank, scale of feat, award status, military-patriotic education of youth using the example of the military exploits of their fathers, as well as creating a factual basis to counter attempts to falsify the history of the War.
There are 3 main search options:
- Search for people and their awards
- Search for decrees and awards orders
- Search data by place and time
To find a person, use the first search option, to do this, open the website http://podvignaroda.mil.ru/ and go to the “People and Awards” tab and enter the last name and first name of the person whose awards you want to find.
To search for decrees and data on the location of military operations, we recommend using another site - “Memory of the People”, which will be discussed below.
If you want to search by award number, you will not be able to do this, because... Award numbers are not indicated in the award documents.
If information about a person’s fate is not known, then the “Feat of the People” website will not suit you, because... it does not contain data on the dead or missing. Such information should be searched on the website www.obd-memorial.ru, trying different spellings of surnames and names because wartime documents may have contained errors in the name or date of birth.
Let us remind you that the initiator of this project is the Department for the Development of Information and Telecommunication Technologies of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, and technical support is provided by the ELAR company. Thanks to them for this site!
The information is taken from two funds: the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (CA MO) and the Central Naval Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (CVMA).
Memory of the people
Later, a more modern website was opened https://pamyat-naroda.ru/ “Memory of the People” with documents of the Second World War, which has a more pleasant design and, most importantly, more information, maps and historical data.
With the help of the “Memory of the People” portal, it has become even easier to reconstruct the military path of your grandfather, find documents about injuries and awards.
The People's Memory project was implemented in accordance with the decision of the Russian Victory Organizing Committee of July 2013, supported by the instructions of the President and the Decree of the Russian Government in 2014. The project provides for the publication on the Internet of archival documents and documents about the losses and awards of soldiers and officers of the First World War, the development of the projects previously implemented by the Russian Ministry of Defense about the Second World War OBD Memorial and Feat of the People into one project - Memory of the People.
On the page https://pamyat-naroda.ru/ops/ you can familiarize yourself with the plans of 226 operations with detailed diagrams on the map. Each page about the operation contains the names of commanders and numbers of military units, as well as a description of the result of the operation.
Figure 1 - Modern map of combat operations during the Second World War.
On the page https://pamyat-naroda.ru/memorial/ you can find military graves in your city. Just enter the name of the city and click the “Find” button. In total, it contains information about 30,588 burials around the world, except the United States.
Figure 2 - Military graves indicating first and last names.
The page about the burial contains information about its condition (good, bad, excellent), type of burial, number of graves, number of known and unknown buried. Also available on the page is a list of those buried with names and dates of birth and death.
Several years ago, a project began, the goal of which was to make available for review a list of Soviet soldiers awarded military orders and medals during the Great Patriotic War. For this purpose, an electronic bank of documents was created, which digitally contains orders for awards and other documents about soldiers who distinguished themselves in battle. All information in the form of a database is available on the website "Feat of the People" a search by the name of the awardee will give a fairly complete result.
Information can be searched both by the name of the awardee and by the number or date of the order. If you want to receive detailed information about what feat or military distinction your relative who participated in the Great Patriotic War was awarded for, then on the main page select the “People and Awards” item and in the form that opens, enter his last name - first name - patronymic (see figure below)
Next, a list of all records that are related to the entered data will open. Of course, namesakes of the gentleman about whom you want to receive information may also be present. If the database contains information on several awards, then there will be a separate line for each award. As can be seen in the example given (see image below), the list of awards of three times Hero of the Soviet Union A.I. Pokryshkin, interspersed with four distinctions received by his namesake Alexander Ivanovich, junior sergeant born in 1911.
By clicking the cursor on the selected line, you can read in the document that opens the description of the feat for which the award was made.
Also, there is access to very detailed accompanying documents, such as award certificates.
In addition to searching by name, it is possible to get acquainted with a large number of orders, which are grouped by dates, as well as orders and medals that were awarded. To do this, you need to select the name of the specific award and the period you are interested in.
As a result, a complete list of orders will become available containing information about the awarding of this award at the specified time.
Help desk address - http://podvignaroda.mil.ru but the “Feat of the People” portal, created in 2010, is only one of the projects that allows you to find out the fates of loved ones who participated in the Great Patriotic War, trace their military path, and read descriptions of the feats for which they were awarded. Thus, feel the connection of times and generations, realize the history of your family as part of the greater History of your Motherland. Even earlier, in 2007, on the initiative of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the “Memorial” website was created, containing an electronic data bank about soldiers killed during the war. It was created with the goal of enabling descendants living today to learn about the final resting place of their ancestors - the fallen defenders of the Fatherland, to establish the fate of missing relatives and friends, and, most importantly, to help preserve their memory.
OBD "Memorial" search for those killed in the Great Patriotic War
http://www.obd-memorial.ru- “Memorial is a website of the Ministry of Defense for searching by last name, first name and patronymic of the burial place of a deceased soldier, on which information is searched. The search is also available for a large number of other input data - date and place of birth, date and place of conscription into the army, last place of service, military rank, date of death, country, region and place of burial. The information in the generalized data bank (GDB) contains digital copies of documents from a large number of sources - reports from combat units about irretrievable losses, documents from hospitals and medical battalions, trophy cards of Soviet prisoners of war, burial passports of military personnel, orders for exclusion from lists, exhumation protocols, and other archival documents .
A query to the database provides information about the places of primary burials of soldiers and officers who died in battle or died from wounds and illnesses in hospitals and medical battalions. Records of documents for filling the generalized data bank are taken from a large number of state archives, including from the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.
The total number of documents to which access is provided on the site is almost 17 million digital copies. These documents contain information about more than 45 thousand passports of military graves, about 20 million personal records about the losses of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War, and indicate the primary burial places of more than 5 million Soviet soldiers and officers. The response to a database query, in many cases, may contain several documents from different sources, this will allow identification with greater accuracy. Many documents contain information about personalities, in particular, the names and addresses of relatives to whom the funerals were sent.
The portal also has access to data that has been classified for decades, namely about Soviet soldiers and officers who were captured by Germans. Documents are presented indicating the name and number of the prisoner of war camp, which were compiled after the release from captivity. In some cases, documents issued upon request make it possible to establish the place and circumstances of the soldier’s death.
It is possible to search according to the data of military commissariats and military transit points, such as the name of the runway, date of arrival and departure, where you arrived from and place of departure, last place of service, team number and others. Thanks to such a tool, you can learn in more detail about the fate of your warrior ancestor and trace his military path. The site database is constantly updated with new information.
“Memory of the People” is the third project of the Ministry of Defense
https://pamyat-naroda.ru- Launched in May 2015, on the 70th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. This is the largest portal on the Internet containing databases of digital copies of archival documents from the war years. A truly colossal amount of work has been done in creating this site. Without exaggeration, we can say that the site contains almost the entire history of the Great Patriotic War, embodied in documents about personalities and battles.
The portal is based on generalized data banks of the first two projects of the RF Ministry of Defense “Memorial” and “Feat of the People”, which were significantly expanded and new data were added to them. The site's database contains more than 425 thousand copies of documents from armies and fronts. In addition, the site contains copies of original documents on the conduct of 216 military operations.
It is possible to search by many types of input data - the soldier’s last name, first name and patronymic, award certificate number, burial place and others.
A special feature of the project is its visibility, when document data is linked to geographic maps and the chronological scale of military events. On interactive maps you can track the combat routes of Red Army units using more than 6 million document reference points. Also, modern maps show more than 12 million places where Soviet soldiers performed their feats, with detailed descriptions and awards. More than 100 thousand original maps of military operations were superimposed on modern geographical maps. Thanks to this, any user, even those new to history and geography, can clearly see the progress of the war on a global scale. And taking into account the georeferencing of personal data from archival documents to maps, he has the opportunity to trace in detail in space and time the combat path of his warrior ancestor from the place of conscription to the place of the last battle and final refuge or until returning home, for those who remained alive.
Combining all the data in one portal made it possible for people to search for the necessary information themselves and greatly facilitated access to archival documents of the war years. Everything that was previously consigned to oblivion for decades in archival corridors and for some reason classified folders has now become available for everyone to see. This portal is also regularly updated with new data from the archives.
Each of the projects mentioned above has its own focus and objectives. Therefore, when searching for information about relatives and friends who participated in the battles of the Great Patriotic War, it is better to review all three projects to complete the data collection. Then individual fragments of invaluable archival information will form a complete picture of the military path of the ancestor-soldier.
Emotional entries in award lists, recorded in the first days, or even hours after the battle, are a living view of the commander and colleagues on the hero’s feat. The general picture of the circumstances of the feat is complemented by records of combat logs and operational management documents. These lines are the most eloquent evidence of the fate of soldiers and officers, whose descendants are obliged to remember their feat. Descriptions of battles compiled not by armchair historians, but by direct participants in the events in meager lines of reports allow us to look at the war from a different angle than through the prism of interpretations in history textbooks.
Good day everyone!
Not long ago I tried to help an acquaintance find relatives who fought in the Second World War (1941-1945). Oddly enough, we managed to find his grandfather quite quickly, the number of his unit where he fought, and also looked at several of his awards. My friend was pleased and proud of his grandfather, but I started thinking...
I think that almost every family has relatives who participated in the Great Patriotic War, and many would like to know more about them (which is why I decided to write this article). Moreover, many old people do not like to talk about the front, and often in the family they do not even know all the grandfather’s awards!
By the way, many people mistakenly believe (and I did until recently) that in order to find at least something, you need to know a lot of information about a person, know how to access archives (and where to go), have a lot of free time, etc. . But in fact, now, to try to start a search, it’s enough to know your first and last name.
And so, below I will consider several interesting sites in more detail...
Addition!
If you have old photographs and you notice how they are getting worse and worse every year, digitize and restore them. Now any novice user can handle this -
No. 1: Feat of the people
A very, very interesting site created by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. It is a large database in which all available documents from military archives are entered: where and who fought, what awards he received, what feats, etc. Absolutely everyone is included, regardless of rank and scale of feat. I can add that the size of the site’s database has no analogues.
Then you will see a list of found people: note that there can be a lot of them if your relative has a common first and last name. Opposite each person his year of birth, rank, order, medal (if any) will be displayed.
The card itself displays quite a lot of information about the person: rank, place of conscription, place of service, date of feat (if any), archival documents about the award, registration card, photo of a piece of paper describing the feat, medals and orders (example below).
In general, quite informative and complete. I recommend starting your search for a person from this site. If you are lucky and you find information about him here, then you will receive pretty decent information to continue the search (you will know the year of birth, the unit where you served, where you were drafted from, etc. details that many no longer know about).
By the way, despite the fact that all the basic information has already been posted on the site, from time to time it is updated with new archival data. Therefore, if you haven’t found anything, try to come back after some time and search again, also use the sites that I will give below.
No. 2: OBD Memorial
The full name of the site is Generalized Data Bank.
The main goal of this site is to enable citizens to find and learn about the fate of their relatives, find out their burial place, where they served, and other information.
The Military Memorial Center of the Russian Armed Forces has carried out unique work, as a result of which you can use a reference system of global importance!
The data used to populate the database of this site is taken from official archival documents located in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the Central Naval Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Military Archive, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, etc.
During the work, more than 16.8 million documents and over 45 thousand passports of military graves were scanned and posted online.
How to search for a person in the OBD
Yes, in general it’s standard. On the main page of the site, enter all the information you know into the search fields. It would be very nice to enter at least the first name, last name, and patronymic. Then click the search button (example below).
In the data found, you will see the person’s date and place of birth, which you can use to navigate and start viewing the necessary profiles.
In the questionnaire you can find out the following information: full name, date and place of birth, date and place of conscription, military rank, reason for retirement, date of retirement, name of the source of information, fund number, source of information. And also look at the scanned sheet itself with archival data.
No. 3: Memory of the people
Another site with a huge database created by the Ministry of Defense. The main goal of the project is to enable all users to obtain information about participants in the Great Patriotic War through new web tools and the development of generalized data banks “Memorial” and “Feat of the People in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.”
To start searching for a person, just enter his full name (if any, then his year of birth). Then click the "Find" button.
Next, you will be shown all found people with similar initials. By opening a card for a person, you will find out: his date of birth, place of conscription, military units, awards, dates of feats, numbers of funds - sources of information, an archive, you can see scans of what awards were given for.
In addition, on this site you can see what the path along which your grandfather moved and fought was like. (example on the map below: the beginning of the journey near Novosibirsk, then Tyumen, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny, etc.).
Note: the map is quite large, and the screenshot below shows a small piece of it.
Where my grandfather was and fought - the path on the map!
No. 4: Immortal Regiment
This is the official website of the Immortal Regiment movement. Those who live in Russia probably know and have heard about it. In general, I mentioned this site for the simple reason - that you can try searching on it (to do this, simply enter the required full name into the search term of the site).
Search by movement database (from the Immortal Regiment website)
By the way, I also want to note that the site has already collected about half a million profiles and they are constantly being added. In addition, you can tell your story about your grandfather (everything you know) and his profile will be entered into the site database (what if someone adds your information?!).
Screenshot from the Immortal Regiment website
From the soldier’s profile you can find out quite detailed information about him: full name, rank, region, locality, history, etc. An example of a card is shown in the screenshot below.
What a soldier’s profile will look like (screenshot from the Immortal Regiment website)
If you are looking for the burial place of your relatives who participated in the Second World War, I recommend that you also read this article:.
In it you will learn how to correctly create a request to the archive, how to formalize it, and where exactly to send it. In general, very useful information.
Well, that’s all for me, I hope I helped, if not find it, then at least gave useful “food” to start searching...
Search for WWII participants by last name. Memory of the People (Feat of the People) - website of the Ministry of Defense: search for soldiers by last name for free, database of WWII participants 1941-1945, complete archive.
Link to the official website. Instructions for searching for a soldier by name 1941-1945. Authentic documents about the Second World War.
Search on the website Memory of the People
Hello everyone who doesn’t know, I want to tell you about this site" Memory of the people". This is not an advertisement, I just saw news about the site on TV one day and decided to check it out. My grandfather Sergei Ilyich went to the front at the beginning of the war. Called from the village of Ulyanovka in Bashkortostan. That’s where I was when I found him on the site, my grandmother kept saying casually, “I wonder if he’s still alive and lost somewhere, or found someone else after the war.” She didn’t have a funeral, as far as I understand, my grandfather was listed as missing.
She told touching stories. When the guys from the village went to war, they said, “We won’t come back,” that in the war they were now shooting from the sky. And I decided to find any information about him.
How to find a relative on the People's Memory website?
I just typed in his initials and place of birth and immediately saw the following:
You can enter your initials on the official website “Memory of the People: Ministry of Defense website searching for a soldier 1941-1945.” The site is available at the link: https://pamyat-naroda.ru/.
I didn’t believe it right away, but you can’t help but believe such detailed information. Apparently, he was captured after the first battles, at the very beginning of the war on September 9, 1941. He died in February '42. Not only is this information in itself comprehensive, I also found a German document.
My surprise knew no bounds. Prisoner of war camp Shtablak. (If there are people who know German, please translate the lines in the right column, I would be very grateful).
In the lower right corner, the first and last name of my grandmother, Vera Makarova, village of Ulyanovka, Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Aurgazinsky district, is written in HAND. All the details. I don’t know why when I see this document I feel uneasy. The Germans are incredibly pedantic. I hope I helped someone, good luck to everyone, learn about the heroes of your families.
Attention! If your search does not give the desired result, we strongly recommend visiting the Feat of the People website. The portals “Feat of the People” and “Memory of the People” (described above) are friendly and have the same essence, but some users have confusion between them. Meanwhile, we wish you successful searches for loved ones and congratulate you on the upcoming Great Victory Day! Hooray!
Database
www.podvignaroda.ru
www.obd-memorial.ru
www.pamyat-naroda.ru
www.rkka.ru/ihandbook.htm
www.moypolk.ru
www.dokst.ru
www.polk.ru
www.pomnite-nas.ru
www.permgani.ru
Otechestvort.rf, rf-poisk.ru
rf-poisk.ru/page/34
soldat.ru
memento.sebastopol.ua
memory-book.com.ua
soldat.ru - a set of reference books for independently searching for information about the fate of military personnel (including a directory of field postal stations of the Red Army in 1941-1945, a directory of the code names of military units (institutions) in 1939-1943, a directory of the location of Red Army hospitals in 1941-1945 years);
www.rkka.ru - a directory of military abbreviations (as well as charters, manuals, directives, orders and personal documents of wartime).
Libraries
oldgazette.ru – old newspapers (including those from the war period);
www.rkka.ru – description of military operations of the Second World War, post-war analysis of the events of the Second World War, military memoirs.
Military cards
www.rkka.ru – military topographic maps with the combat situation (by war periods and operations).
Search Engine Sites
www.rf-poisk.ru is the official website of the Russian Search Movement.
Archives
www.archives.ru – Federal Archive Agency (Rosarkhiv);
www.rusarchives.ru – industry portal “Archives of Russia”;
archive.mil.ru – Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense;
rgvarchive.ru
rgaspi.org
rgavmf.ru – Russian State Archive of the Navy (RGAVMF). The archive stores documents of the Russian Navy (late 17th century - 1940). Naval documentation of the Great Patriotic War and the post-war period is stored in the Central Naval Archive (CVMA) in Gatchina, which is under the jurisdiction of the Russian Ministry of Defense;
victory.rusarchives.ru – a list of federal and regional archives of Russia (with direct links and descriptions of collections of photo and film documents from the period of the Great Patriotic War).
Partners of the Stars of Victory project
www.mil.ru – Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.
www.histrf.ru – Russian Military Historical Society.
www.rgo.ru – Russian Geographical Society.
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Database
www.podvignaroda.ru – a publicly accessible electronic bank of documents on recipients and awards during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945;
www.obd-memorial.ru - a generalized data bank about defenders of the Fatherland, those killed and missing during the Great Patriotic War and the post-war period;
www.pamyat-naroda.ru is a publicly accessible data bank about the fate of participants in the Great Patriotic War. Search for places of primary burials and documents about awards, service, victories and hardships on the battlefields;
www.rkka.ru/ihandbook.htm – awarded the Order of the Red Banner in the period from 1921 to 1931;
www.moypolk.ru - information about participants in the Great Patriotic War, including home front workers - living, dead, dead and missing. Collected and replenished by participants in the all-Russian action “Immortal Regiment”;
www.dokst.ru – information about those killed in captivity in Germany;
www.polk.ru – information about Soviet and Russian soldiers missing in action in the wars of the 20th century (including the pages “The Great Patriotic War” and “Undelivered Awards”);
www.pomnite-nas.ru – photographs and descriptions of military graves;
www.permgani.ru – database on the website of the Perm State Archive of Contemporary History. Includes basic biographical information about former servicemen of the Red Army (natives of the Perm region or called up for military service from the territory of the Kama region), who during the Great Patriotic War were surrounded and (or) captured by the enemy, and after returning to their homeland underwent special state inspection (filtration);
Otechestvort.rf, rf-poisk.ru – electronic version of the book “Names from Soldiers’ Medallions”, volumes 1-6. Contains alphabetical information about those killed during the war whose remains, discovered during search operations, were identified;
rf-poisk.ru/page/34 / – books of memory (by regions of Russia, with direct links and annotations);
soldat.ru – books of memory (for individual regions, types of troops, individual units and formations, about those who died in captivity, those who died in Afghanistan, Chechnya);
memento.sebastopol.ua – Crimean virtual necropolis;
memory-book.com.ua – electronic book of memory of Ukraine;
soldat.ru - a set of reference books for independently searching for information about the fate of military personnel (including a directory of field postal stations of the Red Army in 1941-1945, a directory of the code names of military units (institutions) in 1939-1943, a directory of the location of Red Army hospitals in 1941-1945 years);
rgvarchive.ru – Russian State Military Archive (RGVA). The archive stores documents about the military operations of the Red Army units in 1937-1939. near Lake Khasan, on the Khalkhin Gol River, in the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940. Here are also documents of the border and internal troops of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD-MVD of the USSR since 1918; documents of the Main Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internees of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs and institutions of its system (GUPVI Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR) for the period 1939-1960; personal documents of Soviet military leaders; documents of foreign origin (trophy). On the archive's website you can also find guides and reference books that make working with it easier.
rgaspi.org – Russian State Archive of Socio-Political Information (RGASPI). The period of the Great Patriotic War in RGASPI is represented by documents of an emergency body of state power - the State Defense Committee (GKO, 1941-1945) and the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief;