Where WWII participant Adam Feliksovich Pashinsky died. How to find a WWII veteran by first and last name? Review of useful resources on the Internet

“Missing in action” - many people received notices with this phrase during the war years. There were millions of them, and the fate of these defenders of the Motherland for a long time remained unknown. In most cases, it remains unknown today, but there is still some progress in clarifying the circumstances of the disappearance of the soldiers. Several circumstances contribute to this. Firstly, new technological capabilities have emerged for search automation necessary documents. Secondly, useful and the right job search teams are conducting. Thirdly, the archives of the Ministry of Defense have become more accessible. But even today, in the vast majority of cases, ordinary citizens do not know where to look for those missing in action during the Second World War. This article may help someone find out the fate of their loved ones.

Search difficulties

In addition to factors that contribute to success, there are also those that make it difficult to find those missing in action during the Second World War. Too much time has passed, and there is less and less material evidence of events. There are also no more people who can confirm this or that fact. In addition, disappearances were considered suspicious during and after the war. It was believed that a soldier or officer could be captured, which in those years was considered almost a betrayal. A Red Army soldier could go over to the enemy’s side, and this happened, unfortunately, often. The fate of traitors is mostly known. Collaborators who were caught and identified were tried and either executed or received long terms. Others found refuge in distant lands. Those of them who have survived to this day usually do not want to be found.

Where to look for missing prisoners of war during WWII

The fates of many Soviet prisoners of war after the war developed differently. Some were pardoned by the Stalinist punitive machine, and they returned home safely, although for the rest of their lives they did not feel like full-fledged veterans and they themselves felt some guilt before the “normal” participants in the hostilities. Others were destined long road to places of detention, camps and prisons, where they most often ended up on unsubstantiated charges. A number of soldiers released from captivity ended up in the American, French or British occupation zones. These, as a rule, were betrayed by the allies Soviet troops, but there were exceptions. For the most part, our soldiers wanted to go home to their families, but rare realists understood what awaited them and asked for asylum. Not all of them were traitors - many simply did not want to cut down forest in the Far North or dig canals. In some cases, they find themselves, contact relatives and even assign them foreign inheritances. However, in this case, the search for those missing in action during the Second World War 1941-1945 can be difficult, especially if such a former prisoner changed his last name and does not want to remember his homeland. Well, people are different, as are their destinies, and it’s hard to condemn those who ate bitter bread in a foreign land.

Documentary trail

However, in the vast majority of cases the situation was much simpler and more tragic. In the initial period of the war, soldiers simply died in unknown cauldrons, sometimes together with their commanders, and there was no one to write reports on irreparable losses. Sometimes there were no bodies left, or it was impossible to identify the remains. It would seem, where to look for those missing in action during the Second World War with such confusion?

But there is always one thread left, by pulling which you can somehow unravel the history of the person of interest. The fact is that any person, and especially a military man, leaves behind a “paper” trail. His whole life is accompanied by documentary circulation: clothing and food certificates are issued for a soldier or officer, he is included in the In case of injury in the hospital, a soldier is registered medical card. Here is the answer to the question of where to look for missing people. The Second World War ended long ago, but the documents are kept. Where? In the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense, in Podolsk.

Central Archive of the Moscow Region

The application procedure itself is simple, and it is also free. The archives of the Ministry of Defense do not require money for the search for those missing in the Second World War of 1941-1945, and bear the costs of sending the answer. In order to make a request, you need to collect as much personal information as possible about who you want to find. The more there is, the easier it will be for Central Asian workers to decide where to look for those missing in action during the Great Patriotic War, in which storage and on which shelf the treasured document may lie.

First of all, you need your last name, first name and patronymic, place and date of birth, information about where you were called from, where you were sent and when. If any documentary evidence, notices or even personal letters, then if possible they should be attached (copies). Information about government awards, incentives, injuries and any other information related to service in the Armed Forces of the USSR will also not be superfluous. If you know in which the missing person served, his unit number and rank, then this should also be reported. In general, everything that is possible, but only reliable. All that remains is to put it all on paper, send it by letter to the Archive’s address and wait for a response. It won't be soon, but it will definitely happen. The people who work in the Central Election Commission of Moscow Region are obligatory and responsible.

Foreign archives

In the Second World War of 1941-1945, if the answer is negative from Podolsk, you should continue abroad. The hard times took Soviet soldiers languishing in captivity wherever they went. Their traces are found in Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Austria, Holland, Norway and, of course, Germany. The Germans kept documentation pedantically; a card was issued for each prisoner, equipped with a photograph and personal data, and if the documents were not damaged during hostilities or bombings, the answer would be found. The information concerns not only prisoners of war, but also those who were involved in forced labor. Searching for missing persons in the Second World War sometimes makes it possible to find out about the heroic behavior of a relative in a concentration camp, and if not, then at least clarity will be brought into his fate.

The answer is usually laconic. The archives report on the settlement in the area of which the Red or Red soldier took his last battle. Soviet Army. Information about the place of pre-war residence, the date from which the soldier was removed from all types of allowance, and the place of his burial are confirmed. This is due to the fact that the search for missing persons in the Great Patriotic War by last name, and even by first name and patronymic, can lead to mixed results. Additional confirmation can be provided by the data of relatives to whom the notification should have been sent. If the burial place is indicated as unknown, then it is usually a mass grave located near the indicated settlement. It is important to remember that reports on casualties were often drawn up at the battlefields, and they were written in not very legible handwriting. Searching for missing persons in WWII 1941-1945 can be difficult due to the fact that the letter “a” resembles an “o”, or something like that.

Search engines

In recent decades, the search movement has become widespread. Enthusiasts who want to clarify the question of the fate of millions of soldiers who laid down their lives for their Motherland are engaged in a noble cause - they find the remains of fallen soldiers, determine by many signs whether they belong to one unit or another, and do everything to find out their surnames. No one knows better than these people where to look for those missing in action during the Second World War. In the forests near Yelnya, in the swamps of the Leningrad region, near Rzhev, where fierce battles took place, they conduct careful excavations, handing over to their native land its defenders with military honors. Search teams send information to government officials and the military, who update their databases.

Electronic means

Today, everyone who wants to find out the fate of their glorious ancestors has the opportunity to look into the commander’s reports from the battlefields. And you can do this without leaving your home. On the website of the Ministry of Defense archive you can familiarize yourself with unique documents and verify the veracity of the information provided. These pages emanate living history; they seem to create a bridge between eras. Searching for missing persons in the Great Patriotic War by last name is not difficult, the interface is convenient and accessible to everyone, including the elderly. In any case, we need to start with the lists of the dead. After all, the “funeral” could simply not come, and for many decades the soldier was considered missing.

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 don’t like to talk about the front, and it’s not uncommon for family members to not even know all of their grandfather’s awards!

By the way, many people mistakenly believe (and I did until recently) that in order to find anything, 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...

No. 1: Feat of the people

A very, very interesting site created by the Ministry of Defense 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 leaflet 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 help system global significance!

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 date and place of birth of the person, 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, 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!

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.

We have been keeping the memory of the Great War of the 20th century and its heroes for more than 70 years. We pass it on to our children and grandchildren, trying not to lose a single fact or surname. Almost every family was affected by this event; many fathers, brothers, husbands never returned. Today we can find information about them thanks to painstaking work employees of military archives, volunteers dedicating their free time searching for soldiers' graves. How to do this, how to find a WWII participant by last name, information about his awards, military ranks, place of death? We couldn't get around this important topic attention, we hope that we can help those who are looking and want to find.

Losses in the Great Patriotic War

It is still unknown exactly how many people left us during this great human tragedy. After all, the counting did not begin immediately; only in 1980, with the advent of glasnost in the USSR, historians, politicians, and archive staff were able to begin official work. Until this time, scattered data that were beneficial at that time were received.

After celebrating Victory Day in 1945, J.V. Stalin said that we had buried 7 million Soviet citizens. He spoke, in his opinion, about everyone, both about those who died during the battle and about those who were taken prisoner by the German occupiers. But he missed a lot, did not say about the rear employees who stood at the machine from morning until night, falling dead from exhaustion. I forgot about the sentenced saboteurs, traitors to the motherland, ordinary residents and siege survivors of Leningrad who died in small villages; missing persons. Unfortunately, they can be listed for a long time.
Later L.I. Brezhnev provided different information, he reported 20 million dead.

Today, thanks to decoding secret documents, search work, the numbers become real. Thus, you can see the following picture:

Combat losses received directly at the front during battles amount to about 8,860,400 people.
Non-combat losses (from illnesses, wounds, accidents) - 6,885,100 people.

However, these figures do not yet correspond to complete reality. A war, and such a one at that, is not only the destruction of the enemy at the cost own life. These are broken families - unborn children. This is a huge loss of the male population, thanks to which it will not soon be possible to restore the balance necessary for good demography.

These are diseases, hunger in post-war years and death from it. This is rebuilding the country again, again in many ways, at the cost of people’s lives. All of them also need to be taken into account when doing calculations. All of them are victims of terrible human vanity, whose name is war.

How to find a participant in the Great Patriotic War 1941 - 1945 by last name?

No better memory stars of victory than the desire of the future generation to know how it was. The desire to save information for others, to avoid such repetition. How to find a WWII participant by last name, where to find possible information about grandfathers and great-grandfathers, fathers who took part in battles, knowing their last name? Especially for this purpose, there are now electronic repositories that everyone can access.

obd-memorial.ru - here contains official data containing reports of units about losses, funerals, trophy cards, as well as information about rank, status (died, was killed or disappeared, where), scanned documents.
moypolk.ru is a unique resource containing information about home front workers. The very ones without whom we would not have heard important word"Victory". Thanks to this site, many have already been able to find or help find lost people.

The work of these resources is not only to search for great people, but also to collect information about them. If you have any, please report it to the administrators of these sites. In this way, we will do a great common deed - we will preserve memory and history.

Archive of the Ministry of Defense: search by last name of WWII participants

Another one is the main, central, largest project - http://archive.mil.ru/. The documents preserved there are mostly isolated and remained intact due to the fact that they were taken to the Orenburg region.

Over the years of work, CA staff have created an excellent reference apparatus showing the contents of archival accumulations and funds. Now its goal is to provide people with access to possible documents through electronic computing technology. Thus, a website has been launched where you can try to find a military man who participated in the Second World War, knowing his last name. How to do this?

On the left side of the screen, find the “memory of the people” tab.
Indicate his full name.
The program will give you the available information: date of birth, awards, scanned documents. Everything that is in the files for a given person.
You can set a filter on the right, selecting only the sources you want. But it's better to choose everything.
On this site it is possible to look at military operations on a map and the path of the unit in which the hero served.

This is a unique project in its essence. Such a volume of data collected and digitized from all existing and available sources: card indexes, e-books memory, medical battalion documents and command personnel reference books are no longer there. In truth, as long as such programs and the people who provide them exist, the memory of the people will be eternal.

If you don't find it there the right person, do not despair, there are other sources, they may not be as large-scale, but this does not make them less informative. Who knows in which folder the information you need might be lying around.

Participants of the Second World War: search by last name, archive and awards

Where else can you look? There are more narrowly focused repositories, for example:

dokst.ru. As we said, the victims of this terrible war, those who were captured also became. Their fate may be displayed on foreign websites like this one. Here in the database there is everything about Russian prisoners of war and the burials of Soviet citizens. You only need to know the last name, you can look at the lists of captured people. The Documentation Research Center is located in the city of Dresden, and it was he who organized this site to help people from all over the world. You can not only search the site, but also send a request through it.
Rosarkhiv archives.ru is an agency that is an authority executive branch, which keeps records of all government documents. Here you can make a request either online or by phone. Sample electronic appeal is on the website in the “appeals” section, left column on the page. Some services here are provided for a fee; a list of them can be found in the “archive activities” section. With this in mind, be sure to ask whether you will need to pay for your request.
rgavmf.ru - military directory navy about the destinies and great deeds of our sailors. In the “orders and applications” section there is an address email for processing documents left for storage after 1941. By contacting the archive staff, you can get any information and find out the cost of such a service; most likely it is free.

WWII awards: search by last name

To search for awards and feats, an open portal has been organized, dedicated specifically to this www.podvignaroda.ru. Information is published here about 6 million cases of awards, as well as 500,000 unawarded medals and orders that never reached the recipient. Knowing the name of your hero, you can find a lot of new things about his fate. The posted scanned documents of orders and award sheets, data from registration files, will complement your existing knowledge.

Who else can I contact for information about awards?

On the website of the Central Election Commission of the Ministry of Defense, in the section “Awards are looking for their heroes”, a list of awarded soldiers who did not receive them was published. Additional names can be obtained by phone.
rkka.ru/ihandbook.htm - encyclopedia of the Red Army. It published some lists of the assignment of senior officer ranks and special ranks. The information may not be as extensive, but existing sources should not be neglected.
http://www.warheroes.ru/ is a project created to popularize the exploits of the defenders of the Fatherland.

Many useful information, which sometimes is not found anywhere, can be found on the forums of the above sites. Here people share valuable experiences and tell their own stories that can help you too. There are many enthusiasts who are ready to help everyone in one way or another. They create their own archives, conduct their own research, and can also be found only on forums. Don't shy away from this type of search.

WWII veterans: search by last name

oldgazette.ru - interesting project created by ideological people. A person who wants to find information enters data, it can be anything: full name, name of awards and date of receipt, line from a document, description of an event. This combination of words will be calculated by search engines, but not just on websites, but in old newspapers. Based on the results, you will see everything that was found. Maybe this is where you will be lucky, you will find at least a thread.
It happens that we search among the dead and find among the living. After all, many returned home, but due to the circumstances of that difficult time, they changed their place of residence. To find them, use the website pobediteli.ru. Searchers send letters here asking for help in finding their fellow soldiers, random encounters during the war. The project's capabilities allow you to select a person by name and region, even if he lives abroad. If you see it on these lists or similar, you need to contact the administration and discuss this issue. Kind, attentive staff will definitely help and do everything they can. The project does not interact with government organizations and cannot provide personal information: phone number, address. But it is quite possible to publish your search request. More than 1,000 people have already been able to find each other this way.
1941-1945.at Veterans do not abandon their own. Here on the forum you can communicate, make inquiries among the veterans themselves, perhaps they have met and have information about the person you need.

The search for the living is no less relevant than the search for dead heroes. Who else will tell us the truth about those events, about what they experienced and suffered. About how they greeted victory, the very first, the most expensive, sad and happy at the same time.

Additional sources

Regional archives were created throughout the country. Not so large, held up, often on the shoulders ordinary people, they preserved unique single records. Their addresses are on the website of the movement to perpetuate the memory of the victims. And also: