Search for participants in the Second World War by last name. Memory of the People (Exploit of the People) - website of the Ministry of Defense: search for soldiers by last name for free, database of participants in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, full archive.
Link to the official website. Instructions for finding a soldier named 1941-1945. Authentic documents from the Second World War.
Search on the site Memory of the People
Hello everyone, who does not know I want to tell you about such a site " Memory of the people". This is not an advertisement, I just saw the 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. Summoned from the village of Ulyanovka in Bashkortostan. I was there when I found him on the site, my grandmother casually kept throwing "I wonder if he was still alive and lost somewhere, or found another after the war." The funeral did not come to her, as I understood the grandfather was listed as missing.
She told touching stories. When the guys from the village went to war, they said "We will not return," that in the war they are shooting from the sky now. And I decided to find any information about him.
How to find a relative on the Memory of the People website?
I just typed in his initials and place of birth and immediately saw the following:
You can drive in the initials on the official website "Memory of the People: Site of the Ministry of Defense Search for a Soldier 1941-1945". The site is available at the link: https://pamyat-naroda.ru/.
I didn’t believe it right away, but it’s impossible not to believe such detailed information. Apparently, he was captured after the first battles, at the very beginning of the war on September 9th, 41st year. He died in February 42nd. Not only is this information exhaustive in itself, I also found a German document.
There was no limit to my surprise. POW camp Shtablak. (If there are people who know German, please translate the lines in the right column, I will be very grateful).
In the lower right corner with a PEN written the name and surname of my grandmother, Vera Makarova, the village of Ulyanovka, the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Aurgazinsky District. 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 everyone, learn about the heroes of your families.
Attention! If your searches did not give the desired result, we strongly recommend visiting the site Feat of the people. 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!
Before you is the main page of the portal with the main thematic sections: War heroes, Combat operations, War graves, Unit documents, Information about a combat operation, Interactive map, Additional information blocks, Access to a personal archive.
Enter in the search box the last name, first name and patronymic of the person you are looking for. Press the "Find" button or press the "Enter" key on your keyboard.
The line for searching personalities is also located at the top of the page in the "Heroes of War" section. The search engine will return all results that match your query.
To the right of the Find button is the Refine advanced search button. After clicking on it, an additional search menu will open, in which you can enter the data you know for a more precise search: the military rank of a person, place of birth, conscription, retirement or burial, date of retirement or death and other parameters.
You can also refine the search by indicating the sources of information for this - documents about awards (registration card index, anniversary card index, award documents); documents on losses (reports of irrecoverable losses, documents of hospitals and medical battalions, documents clarifying losses, documents on prisoners of war, etc.).
So, step by step studying the original archival documents of the war, you can find out about what were the everyday life of your relative.
In the search results, in addition to the person's full name, the name of the award (medal, order), date and place of birth, data source (summary card index, anniversary card index) may be indicated; place and reason for leaving (killed, died of wounds, missing); data from the military transit point.
The system also automatically displays a selection with similar data on the participant in the war. This information may be more accurate or different. You can independently choose the information relevant to your request.
By clicking on the full name of a person that matches your search, you will be taken to a page with an archival document, where a line will be highlighted concerning the person you are looking for, and on the right - information about the archival document itself.
In the line with the person's full name, you will see icons prompting you to view a digital copy of the document, save it, or add a page to your personal archive.
Awards and feats
If the sought-after person was awarded orders and / or medals, has a Hero's Star, there is information about this on the portal. You will see a highlighted line in the reward list, you will be able to go to the description of the accomplished feat, the reward list.
Having learned about the place and time of the feat, you can fully restore the circumstances of your relative's service according to the documents of military operations.
To work with the found documents, create and save a collection of archival documents for a person or event, use the "Personal archive" section.
Combat path
To find out the details of the service and restore the combat path of a participant in the Great Patriotic War, pay attention to the active link Combat path of a Hero / unit.
By clicking on this line, you will be taken to an interactive service, which includes documentary and geo-informational parts.
To the left of the map are the milestones of the combat path. By clicking on the "Place of call", you "move" on the map to the corresponding point and you will see an active link "Heroes called up in this military enlistment office".
The next line after the "Place of call" will be a line about the first hostilities in which a soldier of the Red Army took part. The system will determine their date, place on a modern and historical map, as well as select documents that reflect military realities. These can be logs of military actions of front headquarters, logs of combat actions of subunits, orders, reports, dispatches, maps, reports, reports, etc.
By the dates of the subunits' actions and geographic referencing, you can get an idea of the combat operations, determine the movement of Soviet troops, and find out all the details of the course of the war.
On the main page, you can select the operation displayed in the center of the page using the time slider. Just move the time slider to the date you are interested in.
You will see the name and description of the results of the combat operation. Below the description, a list of military units and commanders will be presented with links to the corresponding pages of the military unit or military leader.
Having found information about the place and time of the death of your relative, you will be able to determine with a high degree of probability exactly what tasks were being solved by the unit, army, front at that moment.
Memory
Similar to the "Combat Operations" section, you can also use the additional search parameters in the "Military Graves" section.
In the central part of the page, on the left, there is a list of burials (each of the names in the list is a link to the burial page), on the right there is an interactive map with labels on the number of burials in this area at the selected scale.
After zooming in, new markers with more accurate reference to the terrain will be shown, and by clicking on the mark, you will see a window with information about the burial and a link to a page with more detailed information. The map reflects modern burials, primary burials, places of disposal, hospitals and camps.
By clicking on any object (burial, hospital ...), you will be taken to its page. For example, for hospitals, a link to additional information and the alphabetical book of the deceased will be active. The burial page will contain information, a list of buried persons, an object record card.
See details
"The data bank is like the Bible for us. It made it more efficient to search and establish the names of soldiers, I'm afraid to say in what frequency. We have always worked in the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense ... Even if we ourselves worked there, it took years. And now several hours, even if it’s night work, it’s many times faster. This is the highest achievement in recent years in perpetuating the memory of the fallen defenders of the Fatherland. "
Nina Kulikovskikh, Chairman of the Board of the Smolensk Regional Public Organization "Search Association" Duty ".
Meeting of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev with representatives of search organizations. Smolensk, May 2017
The Internet project of the Ministry of Defense of Russia "Podvig of the People" is intended to facilitate those who wish to study the history of those years. Indeed, this project contains tens of thousands of documents on awards for deeds performed by ordinary Soviet people during the Second World War and the war with Japan. In this article I will describe how to search by last name in the People's Feat, tell you about the functionality of the website of the Ministry of Defense, and also explain how to use it.
"The feat of the people" - an unprecedented project of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, dedicated to the awards of the soldiers of the Red Army in the Second World War
The Great Patriotic War left an indelible mark on the history of our people. Millions of dead, thousands of destroyed cities and villages, tens of thousands of destroyed enterprises, collective and state farms - the price for the Victory was simply enormous. The past years are gradually erasing the details of those years from the memory of generations, the outlines of what has happened look more and more vague, the direct participants in the victory over Nazism remain alive.
The importance of searching for participants in the Great Patriotic War in the "Podvig of the People"
The Internet resource "Feat of the People" is a generalized databank of awards received by Soviet soldiers and commanders during the Great Patriotic War (as well as the Manchurian operation that ended with the surrender of Japan). This data warehouse includes the corresponding scanned documents from the Russian archives of the CA MO and TsVMA (several tens of millions of documents), including numerous records of awards with medals and orders "For Military Merit", "For Courage" of the "Patriotic War" (I and II degrees) , for the defense and liberation of various territories, and so on.
First of all, the website of the Ministry of Defense is aimed at finding information about awards and the conditions for receiving them, allowing you to get detailed information about the type of award, the date of the achievement and the circumstances of the feat, the place of service of a serviceman, and more.
The site began work in the spring of 2010, and to this day it continues to be filled with relevant documents (the last major addition of documents took place in 2015). In total, it is planned to add more than 30 million documents to the database.
The ELAR Corporation provided technical support to the project. The resource that previously existed in Flash has now been rewritten in HTML5.
Feat of the People search by last names, awards and those who returned from the war
To work with this service, go to the site podvignaroda.ru. At the very top of the site there are five main tabs:
For example, if you want to search by the full name of your relative, go to the "People and awards" tab, and in the corresponding window that opens, enter the full name (at least the last name) of your relative, and click on the "Search" button.
Use the PEOPLE & AWARDS tab to find the people you need You will be presented with a list of found people whose full name matches the one you specified. Look for the person you need in this list, click on his data, and you will be taken to another page, where a list of orders and other documents for this person will be indicated.
By choosing any of the documents listed here, you will have the opportunity to familiarize yourself with its digital form, and visually study all the documentation available on this resource about the award received.
Work on other contributions of the resource is carried out in a similar way through the functionality of the search bar.
Conclusion
In this article, I have described the "People's Feat" resource, as well as the features of its functionality. Moreover, this project of the Ministry of Defense is not the only one of its kind. One can also note the "Memory of the People" project, in which it is possible to search for data on the place of hostilities (there are data on more than two hundred military operations), according to decrees and other relevant documents. Access to unique historical data allows you to recreate a picture of the heroic past of our people, thereby contributing to the development of spiritual and historical ties between generations of our country.
The Resource "Memory of the People" was created so that each user could find out where they fought and what awards were received by their grandfathers or great-grandfathers who took part in the Great Patriotic War. Within the framework of the project, such archival documentation as award lists, orders, operational descriptions of the situation on the battlefield and other original written evidence of the events of those years were digitized. The site enables each user to find information about their relatives and create a personal archive from the documents presented on the site. And, if you want to know how to search for WWII participants by the names of those who returned from the war using the Memory of the People resource, then read on.
Memory of the People project
To start the search, open https://pamyat-naroda.ru/, go to the “Heroes of War” section, or use the form on the main page (in this case, we will be automatically transferred to “Heroes of War” anyway). Enter the requested data (last name, first name, patronymic and year of birth) into the search bar of the Memory of the People service and press the Enter key on the keyboard or LMB on the word “Find”.
Search for a fighter from the main page of the site If there is not enough data and it was not possible to find a participant in the hostilities, click "Refine" and enter the information that we know:
- The place where the fighter was born.
- Awarded title.
- Place of service.
- The date the participant dropped out or died.
- The ID of the record in the database.
In the case when this information is not enough, we expand additional fields under the data entry form and fill in each line with the information we know.
Entering additional information In our case, only 4 documents were found. But it so happens that the personal data of the participants in the Second World War coincide, and the search becomes difficult. Or there are a lot of documents, among which it is difficult to find what you need. To simplify the search, a panel is provided above the results.
Refinement panel makes it easy to find If we need information about which unit was commanded by the WWII participant whom we are looking for, or what awards he had, then click on the desired section on the above panel and shorten the search circle. When switching between these sections on the right in the block “Sources of information”, the places from which information about the awards or the combat activities of the WWII participant are taken from are displayed. Below the search results is a list of all the awards to which the fighter is represented.
Viewing and saving documents
So, the search has been completed, and we have several results of the Memory of the People service we need. How to save them so as not to lose valuable information and constantly have access to it? Opposite each of the documents there are icons with which you can:
- View original.
- Download the file to your computer (scanned copy of an act, order or other document in jpg format).
- Add information about a participant in hostilities to your personal archive on the Memory of the People website.
What can be done with documents If the load on the resource is too high, access to the personal archive and the documents stored in it may be limited. Therefore, if information about a participant in the Second World War is necessary for study or work, it is better to save it to a folder on your computer.
Detailed information about the heroes of the war on the site of the Memory of the People
Now let's see where on the "People's Memory" resource there is more detailed information about the war hero found by his last name. We click on the personal data of the participant of the Second World War. A page opens, where the surname, name, patronymic and rank of the fighter are indicated.
Reward Details
Also here is information about the award that we selected in the search results: who awarded, when the feat was performed, information about the place of birth and call of the hero and other data, including the name of the archive from where this data was taken. Scrolling down the page below, we see the scanned document. This is a line in the award list.
Switching between sections, we read:
- "Feat" - a detailed description of the feat for the accomplishment of which the fighter was nominated for the award, contained in the combat log or other documents, which reflected the course of hostilities.
- “The first page of an order or decree” - information about the front and the combat unit in which the Great Patriotic War participant served, as well as on behalf of whom and for what he was awarded.
- "Award sheet" - a document certifying the presentation of the award, with the personal data of the fighter and a summary of the feat.
Line in the award list Documents from this page can be saved to a computer, scaled in height and / or width, and enlarged / reduced. It is also possible to view the originals of the submitted documents.
Combat path of the hero / unit
The "People's Memory" resource allows us to track the combat path traveled by the hero and the unit in which he served. To do this, from the “Awarding documents” section, go to the “Combat path of the hero / unit”.
Combat path of the hero / unit This page lists all the units in which the fighter served. Switching between them, we see his path and all the hostilities in which he participated during the Second World War. Each of the coordinates of the military path means a specific battle. On the left in the table, the dates of operations are indicated, tied to coordinates on the map.
The military path is shown from the very beginning (from the place of conscription in the district military registration and enlistment office) to the victorious end. The scale of the map can be increased so that the outlines of the villages where the battles took place or near which our army followed. This effect makes it possible to examine in detail the course of the war. There are symbols below the map. Guided by them, we understand at what time the fighter we are looking for was in the hospital, received awards, where he was born, where he was called from and much more. Also, in the panel above the map, you can add a higher-level part, which included the unit where the war hero served, and a lower-level one. All these nuances allow you to recreate a more complete picture of the events of the Second World War.
When you click on a specific coordinate of the path in the upper right corner of the map, we see a plate that contains the following information:
- The name of the unit where the fighter served.
- The date of the battle indicated on the map.
- The number of documents attesting to this event.
Description of the battle in the selected coordinate After clicking on the number of documents of the units found, the next page with written evidence of specific battles is loaded. When searching for the required order / report / report, you can use the general list or narrow the search range by switching between the section names. That is, if we only need war logs or maps / schemes, then we click on the selected category and look for the document that is needed, or we look through everything in turn in the Memory of the People. You can also use a convenient filter located to the right of the list of documents. By unchecking or checking the boxes in the sections we need, we narrow the search circle and search for information faster.
By clicking on the name of a report or diagram, journal or order, we study the original evidence of those events, written or drawn by the participants in the war themselves. According to the available information, we will find out in which archive each of the documents is now located, and who compiled them. From this page, you can save the found written evidence of the combat path of a WWII participant by the name of those who returned from the war to your personal archive on the site.
Thus, performing a search for WWII participants by the names of those who returned from the war on the Memory of the People website, you can not only get information about the hero's awards, but also as fully (as far as the available documents allow) track the course of battles from the very place of the fighter's call-up.
Write in the comments below the article if you need more information. A lot of people look at them and can help in finding the necessary information.
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 to provide information about the place of their burial to relatives and friends, the Memorial website was launched in 2007.
This site has been developed under the direction of the Ministry of Defense. Over the 10 years of existence of the Memorial archive, there are about 17 million digital copies of documents on irrecoverable losses, as well as about 20 million personal records about the losses of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War. The primary burial sites of more than 5 million soldiers and officers have been made public.
If you need to find your relatives, then use the site www.obd-memorial.ru, which has an archive of participants in the Great Patriotic War (WWII). Using the archive of the Ministry of Defense, you can search by the name of the participants in the Second World War.
By going to the Memorial website, you can start looking for a participant in the Great Patriotic War. To do this, on the main page of the site, use the "Set destinies" tab. To start a search by last name, you need to enter the following information in the empty fields: last name, first name, patronymic, year of birth, title. If you cannot fill in one of the fields, then you can leave the field blank.
Set destinies After filling in the fields and conducting the search, the computer will give you the search results.
If nothing was found for your request, then you can use the advanced search. During the advanced search, it is possible to set the following search parameters: full name, surname in Latin, date of birth, place of birth, date and place of conscription, 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 where he was reburied, place of capture, date of death. It also provides the ability to specify the lists in which you need to search in the first place.
Advanced Search
If you still could not find anyone, then do not despair. The archive of the Ministry of Defense of the participants in the Great Patriotic War is annually replenished with new records. 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 participants of the Second World War
