Research
Why this project matters
Millions of pages of German military records from World War II have survived in archives. Among operational reports, intelligence files, correspondence and other documents are interrogations of Soviet prisoners of war and defectors, reports concerning civilians, and numerous other records containing individual names.
Many of these names remain effectively hidden. The documents were created by German military units rather than as personal records, and conventional archival catalogues usually describe files as a whole rather than the individuals mentioned on individual pages. As a result, a document containing information about a particular Soviet soldier or civilian may exist online but remain almost impossible to find by searching for that person's name.
What we are doing
This project aims to identify these individual references systematically.
You will examine digitized German military documents and record the names of Soviet military personnel and civilians whenever they appear, together with a small amount of information that you can read directly from the document – such as year of birth and military unit, when these are given.
You do not need to transcribe or translate the entire document.
Each identified person will remain linked to the exact archival document in which the name was found. The resulting data can therefore serve not merely as a list of names, but as an index leading researchers and families back to the original historical source.
Why your contribution matters
The surviving German records comprise an enormous body of material. Names may occur almost anywhere – in prisoner interrogations, intelligence reports, captured Soviet documents, lists, reports on occupied territories and routine military correspondence.
Finding them page by page is work that cannot realistically be carried out by a single researcher.
By examining these records, you can help uncover references that have remained buried in archival files for more than eighty years.
The long-term goal
The long-term goal is to build a freely accessible searchable database of Soviet individuals mentioned in German wartime records, with every entry connected to its archival source.
Even a single name found on a single page may lead someone to a document about a relative whose wartime fate has remained unknown.