Order of the Patriotic War, 1st class, Tsamo archive. Learn about the military path and exploits of your grandfather and great-grandfather on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War

Information technology opens up enormous opportunities for us. Now we can find a person via the Internet without leaving home. Some people use this chance to find out at least something about the participants in the war of 1941-1945. After all, how many destinies were then lost, missing. Today, relatives are trying to restore information and find out the details of what happened. Previously, it was very difficult to find a veteran of the Patriotic War by last name or other information, but now it is quite possible. There are many electronic resources and databases for this. We will write about them below.

Where can I find information about participants in World War II?

Get ready for a difficult task to solve. Below we list the largest electronic resources, created with government support and central archives:

“Memorial” is a project that is a generalized repository. There are more than 33 million records about the fate of soldiers and burial places. A search on the site is carried out both by a person’s last name and by any other indicators. You can indicate the year of birth, place or rank. You can additionally use the " Advanced Search" By default, the system will work with summary records compiled for each person from available documents;
“Memory of the People” is another project dedicated to the heroes of the Second World War. To search, you need to enter your full name in the line located at the top of the page " Heroes of War" You can also use the following points: “ Combat operations», « Military graves», « Parts documents" In them you can see the addresses of burial places and the names of fallen soldiers, material about military operations, the fate of its participants, etc.

Both sites are easy to use. A colossal number of unique documents are stored here in electronic form, which are not found anywhere else.

Search for WWII veterans by awards

The electronic archive “Feat of the People” contains information about more than 6 million awards issued for the capture, defense, and liberation of cities and territories.

You can search both by full name and by dates and names of orders. And if you have any documents on hand, you can enter text from them into the appropriate fields using the button “ Advanced Search" Then the resource will issue all award sheets and orders in which this set of proposals appears.

You can also use the portal “About Awards.ru”. It contains more than 20 million awards records.

List of military archives and departments

There is an option to go directly to military storage facilities and departments and inquire there:

In addition, projects on which you can read old wartime newspapers. They often posted texts with photographs about the achievements of our troops at the front, in order to raise patriotism among the people, and listed the names of heroes and leaders:

You may have to spend a lot of time, but the more resources you visit, the more applications you leave, the more likely you will be successful.

How to find those killed or missing in the war of 1941-1945?

Here we list resources where you can find out about the fate of people left on the battlefields:

Project "Archive Battalion" created with the aim of restoring information about participants in the wars of the 20th century. You can leave a request on the website with a request to conduct research on the exploits of your hero, where and how he fought and died. It is also possible to contact the office directly to the employees. The address is here;
Book of memory "Immortal Regiment". The platform allows you to obtain information about Muscovites, both those who returned home and those who died;
Electronic memorial “Remember About” is a social site for those who are trying to preserve the memory of relatives and friends who participated in the Second World War. You can create a page in memory of a veteran here, tell his story, publish photographs and documents. And also do a search;
On site

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, surname in Latin, date of birth, place of birth, date and place of enlistment, 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 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. The archive of the Ministry of Defense of participants in the Great Patriotic War is updated annually 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 WWII participants

Several years ago, a project began to be implemented, 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 the description of the feat for which the award was made in the document that opens.

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.

Today, anyone has the opportunity to find information about relatives and loved ones who died or disappeared during the Great Patriotic War. Many websites have been created to study documents containing personal data of military personnel during the war. "RG" presents an overview of the most useful of them. Therefore, do not despair if you were unable to find any data about your relatives in the bank of unpresented awards of the Rossiyskaya Gazeta - the search can be continued on other Internet resources.