Died in the war 1941 1945. How to find out about the fate of an ancestor who died or disappeared during the Great Patriotic War

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 they were all forgotten a long time ago...”

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 loved one in the 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.

Foma told about where and how to look for information about the burial place of a soldier of the Great Patriotic War Dmitry Alexandrovich Belov, candidate historical sciences, Director of the Research Center for Regional History of Volgograd state academy postgraduate education, vice-president of the International Charitable Foundation " Battle of Stalingrad».

Step 1. Where to start

The fastest way to find your relative who died in the Great Patriotic War is the generalized Memorial data bank, the database of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense (TsAMO):

To do this:

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 from, 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 both the last name 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 no information is available, one can hope that search parties, who are engaged in searching 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. Gather 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. Don't hesitate! 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.

Databases

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 conventional names military units(institutions) in 1939-1943, directory of the deployment of Red Army hospitals in 1941-1945);

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.

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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Databases

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 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 modern 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 they underwent a special state check (filtration);

Otechestvort.rf, rf-poisk.ru – electronic version of the book “Names from soldier 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 – e-book 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 Soviet-Finnish war 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 the emergency government body - State Committee defense (GKO, 1941-1945) and the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief;

USSR combat losses counted to the last man

Based on materials from a long-term statistical study of combat losses Soviet Union, made by the Main Organizational and Mobilization Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces (USSR-Russia).

In total, taking into account the personnel composition, 34,476.7 thousand people were drafted into the Armed Forces of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War, including 29,574.9 thousand who were mobilized. More than 33% of the citizens of the USSR who ever put on an overcoat were in service annually, of which approximately half (5-6.5 million) were constantly in the active army on the Soviet-German front.

The number of fronts operating against the Nazi troops was variable and amounted to: slightly more than 3.0 million people in 1941 and 6.7 million people in 1944.

490 thousand women were drafted into the army and navy.

As of July 1, 1945, 11,390.6 thousand people were on the list in the Armed Forces, 1,046 thousand people were treated in hospitals, and 403.2 thousand were on payroll in other departments.

Of the total number of career military personnel and conscripts into the Armed Forces, 21.7 million people left for various reasons during the war.

#comm#Total losses of the Red Army and Navy during the entire war with Germany 1941-1945. (including sanitary losses) amount to 29,592,749 people.#/comm#

Including:

Killed and died during the evacuation stage - 5,177,410;

Died from wounds in hospitals - 1,100,327;

Non-combat irretrievable losses – 540,580;

Missing in action, captured and unaccounted losses - 4,454,709;

Total total irrecoverable losses – 11,273,026. Of these, irretrievable combat losses amounted to 8,668,400.

Sanitary losses with evacuation to the hospital - 18.319.723.

Along with army and navy personnel, other military formations, militias, partisans and underground fighters took part in the hostilities. 40 militia divisions joined the army, of which 26 went through the entire war (more than 2.0 million people joined the army through the people's militia). During the war, more than 6 thousand acted behind enemy lines partisan detachments, in which there were more than 1 million people.

...As a result of generalization and analysis of data from various sources, it was determined that during the war years 4.559 thousand Soviet military personnel went missing and were captured, which are distributed as follows:

Killed in battles and classified as missing - about 500 thousand;

Returned from captivity after the end of the war - 1,836 thousand;

939 thousand were called up for the second time into the Armed Forces.

Thus, in German captivity There were about 4.059 thousand military personnel, of which more than 1.2 million were deliberately killed or died as a result of starvation and torture. These figures diverge from the “generally accepted” mythical data, since the Germans counted as “prisoners” all men on the territory of the USSR between the ages of 17 and 55. Thus, according to the General Staff of the Red Army, more than 500 thousand people liable for military service were captured, conscripted, but not included in the troops and not included in the lists of units. Summary data gives reason to talk about the extermination of more than 3.6 million Soviet civilians under the guise of “prisoners of war” in fascist concentration camps.

#comm#The total human losses of Germany, including the mobilized male population of Austria, amounted to 13.448 thousand people, 75.1 percent of those put into service. At the same time, irretrievable losses on the Soviet-German front amounted to 6.923.7 thousand people.#/comm#

Germany's allies (Hungary, Italy, Romania and Finland) on the Soviet-German front irrevocably lost 1,725.8 thousand people. After May 9 before Soviet troops 1,284 thousand enemy soldiers and officers laid down their arms and surrendered.

Thus, the human losses of Germany and its allies in combat operations against the USSR amounted to 8,649.5 thousand people.

Based on materials " Help Desk Germany" the total number of those buried on the territory of the USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe is 3,226 thousand, including the names of only 2,395 thousand buried soldiers and officers. According to German, very contradictory data (especially for 1945), of the number of prisoners of war (2.4 million) 1.939 thousand people returned to Germany, 450.6 thousand Germans died in captivity.

According to the Soviet command, the total number of captured military personnel from Germany, according to NKVD records and name lists, amounted to 3,777.3 thousand people. Of these, over 600 thousand prisoners of different nationalities were released directly at the front.

In addition, various foreign and volunteer formations numbering up to 600 thousand people took part in the war on the German side. The irretrievable losses of the Spanish and Slovak divisions, the French, Belgians and Flemings, the ROA, the OUN, the Baltic and Muslim SS and police forces amounted to about 230 thousand people killed.

During the period of hostilities (August-September 1945), the Japanese Kwantung Army lost 83.7 thousand killed and 640.1 thousand captured.

Final data on losses of the USSR Armed Forces in wars, military conflicts and hostilities (1918-1989)

Wars, military conflicts and fighting: irretrievable combat losses / sanitary losses (respectively):

Civil War 1918-1922: 939.755 /6.791.783.

The fight against Basmachism 1923-1931: 626 /867.

Soviet-Chinese conflict 1929: 187 /665.

Military assistance to Spain in 1936-1939. and China in 1937-1939: 353 /no data.

Reflection of Japanese aggression on the lake. Hasan 1938: 989 /3.279.

Fighting on the river Khalkhin-Gol 1939: 8.931 /15.952.

Trip to Western Ukraine and Western Belarus: 1.139 /2.383.

Soviet-Finnish war 1939-1940: 126.875 / 264.908.

Great Patriotic War: 8,668,400 /22,326,905.

Korean War 1950-1953: 299 /no data.

Events in Hungary 1956: 750 /1.540.

Entry of troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968: 96/87.

Border military conflicts with China in the Far East and Kazakhstan 1969: 60/99.

Providing military-technical assistance to foreign states 1962-1979: 145 / no data (irretrievable losses in Vietnam - 13 people).

REFERENCE

on the number of military personnel missing in action during the years

Great Patriotic War

To date, official data on human losses of the Red Army and Navy during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945. contained in the directory:

“The Great Patriotic War is not classified. Book of losses. Newest reference book/ , . – M.: Veche, 2010. – 384 p.”,

which is a development of an earlier edition:

“The classification of secrecy has been removed: Losses of the Armed Forces of the USSR in wars, hostilities and military conflicts: Statistical research / Under the general. Ed. . – M.: Voenizdat, 1993.”

In this statistical study, the number of missing and captured Soviet military personnel is summarized. Of these, a significant number were prisoners of war. The section “Irreversible losses” provides the following figures according to the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation:

3396.4 thousand people went missing and were captured (according to reports from troops and data from repatriation authorities).

Unaccounted losses in the first months of the war: died, went missing in combat operations, when there were no reports from the fronts and armies (identified by individual archival documents, including the German command) 1162.6 thousand people.

Total: the number of missing and captured Soviet military personnel is determined at 4 million 559 thousand people.

939.7 thousand people were called up in the liberated territory and sent to the troops from among the military personnel who were previously surrounded or missing.

1,836 thousand people returned from captivity at the end of the war (according to repatriation authorities).

Total: excluded from the number of losses: 2 million 775.7 thousand people.

Including those who did not return from captivity (perished, died, emigrated to other countries) 1 million 783.3 thousand people.

Thus, the number of missing people can be determined as 1 million 783.3 thousand people.

According to German data, 673 thousand people died in captivity. Of the remaining 1110.3 thousand people, according to domestic data, more than half also died (died) in captivity. Thus, a total of 4,059 thousand Soviet military personnel were captured, and about 500 thousand died in battle, although according to reports from the fronts they were counted as missing in action.

The above figures, of course, cannot be considered final, with the exception of reliably taken into account military personnel who returned from captivity and were called up again.

The total number of USSR citizens missing during the Great Patriotic War is much greater, since the number of military losses does not include losses of the civilian population, which are very difficult to calculate due to the imperfection of domestic statistics.

Many independent researchers believe that the real number of missing military personnel is significantly higher than the official one. This is indirectly evidenced by the analysis of regional Books of Memory, where approximately half of the citizens drafted into the ranks of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (since 1943 - Soviet Army) and those who did not return from the war are marked as missing in action. The total irretrievable losses of the Armed Forces are determined in the above reference book at 8 million 668.4 thousand people, and in total 29 million 574.9 thousand people were drafted into the active army.

Other data on the number of missing people were announced by the President of the Russian Federation at a meeting of the Russian Organizing Committee “Victory” in St. Petersburg in January 2009:

· more than 2.4 million people are still missing;

· the names of 6 million soldiers out of 9.5 million who are in registered mass graves are unknown, of which there are about 47 thousand in our country and abroad.

These data say that the total irretrievable losses of the Armed Forces in the Great Patriotic War are approximately 13 million people, which is much higher than the figure of 8 million 664.8 thousand people from the reference book “The Great Patriotic War Unclassified. Book of losses. The latest reference publication /, etc. – M., 2010,” prepared by the author’s group of the General Staff and the Military Memorial Center of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (now the Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (for perpetuating the memory of those killed in defense of the Fatherland).

All this indicates that there is currently no more or less accurate and reasonable number of military personnel missing in action in the Great Patriotic War. This leaves wide scope for further research on this issue.

It is the missing soldiers and officers, as well as military personnel who were not properly buried, but included in the losses, that are the main object of activity for both the Russian search traffic in general, and our organization. These are several million people whose military fate is still unknown. Our country’s search engines will have enough work on the fields of past battles of the Great Patriotic War for many years to come.

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 “Battle of Stalingrad” told “Foma” about where and how to look for information about the burial place of a soldier of the Great Patriotic War "

STEP 1. WHERE TO START

The fastest way to find your relative who died in the Great Patriotic War is the generalized Memorial data bank, the database of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense (TsAMO):

To do 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.

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 the division number and the fighting area are known, then you can at least find a description in general terms.

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.__-th Infantry Division. I’m looking for a relative”). After this, your request will be able to be read by anyone who visits this site. Don't hesitate! 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