Good day everyone!
Not so long ago, I tried to help an acquaintance find relatives who fought in the Second World War (1941-1945). Oddly enough, we quickly managed to find his grandfather, the number of his unit where he fought, and also looked at several of his awards. The acquaintance was pleased and proud of his grandfather, but I thought ...
I think that after all, 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 sketch this article). Moreover, many old people do not like to talk about the front, and it is not uncommon for the family to not even know all the grandfather's awards!
By the way, many mistakenly believe (and I did until recently) that in order to find at least something, 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, in order to try to start a search, it is enough to know the first and last name.
And so, below I will consider several interesting sites in more detail ...
Addition!
If you have old photos and you notice how every year they get worse and worse, digitize and restore them. Now any novice user can handle it -
No. 1: The feat of the people
A very, very interesting site created by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. It is a large database in which all available documents from the military archives are entered: where and who fought, what awards he received, what feats, etc. Absolutely everything is entered, regardless of the ranks and scale of the feat. I can add that the base of the site has no analogues in size.
Then you will see a list of found people: note that there can be a lot of them if your relative has a common name and surname. Opposite each person will be displayed his year of birth, rank, order, medal (if any).
The card itself displays quite a lot of information per person: rank, place of conscription, place of service, date of the feat (if any), archival documents on the award, registration card, photo of the 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 data about him here, then you will get pretty decent information to continue your search (you will know the year of birth, the part where he served, where he was called from, etc. details that many people don’t already 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 did not find anything, try to go in after a while and search again, also use the sites that I will give below.
#2: OBD Memorial
The full name of the site is Generalized Databank.
The main purpose of this site is to enable citizens to find and learn about the fate of their relatives, find out the place of their burial, where they served, and other information.
The Military Memorial Center of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation carried out a unique work, as a result of which you can use the reference system of global importance!
The data used to populate the database of this site are 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, more than 45 thousand passports of military graves were scanned and posted online.
How to search for a person in OBD
Yes, it's pretty standard. On the main page of the site, enter all the information that you know into the search fields. It would be nice to enter at least the first name, last name, and patronymic. Then press the search button (example below).
In the data found, you will see the date and place of birth of a person, by which you can navigate and start viewing the necessary profiles.
The following information can be found in the questionnaire: full name, date and place of birth, date and place of conscription, military rank, reason for leaving, date of leaving, name of the source of information, fund number, source of information. And also see the scanned sheet itself with archived data.
No. 3: Memory of the people
Another site with a huge database created by the Department of Defense. The main goal of the project is to enable all users to obtain information about the participants of 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 another year of birth). Then click the "Find" button.
Next, you will be shown all the people found 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 for which awards were given.
In addition, on this site you can see what was the path along which your grandfather moved and fought (an 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 grandfather was and fought - the path on the map!
#4: Immortal Regiment
This is the official website of the Immortal Regiment movement. Those who live in Russia probably know and have heard about him. In general, I mentioned this site for the simple reason that you can try to search on it (for this, just type in the required full name in the search term of the site).
Search by movement base (from the site "Immortal Regiment")
By the way, I also want to note that the site has already collected about half a million profiles and they are constantly being added. In addition, you can tell your story about grandfather (everything you know) and his profile will be entered into the site database (Suddenly someone will add your information?!).
Screenshot from the site "Immortal Regiment"
From the soldier's profile, you can find out quite detailed information about him: full name, rank, region, locality, history, etc. An example of a card is shown in the screenshot below.
How the soldier's profile will look like (screenshot from the site "Immortal Regiment")
If you are looking for a burial place for 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 issue it, and where exactly to send it. In general, very useful information.
Well, that's all for me, I hope it helped, if not found, then at least gave useful "food" to start searching ...
Instructions for finding information about soldiers who did not return from the front.
Every May 9, the "Immortal Regiment" is held. I would also like to participate, but I know almost nothing about my front-line relatives. Where to look for information?
More than 6.3 million soldiers died in the Great Patriotic War, 4.5 million went missing. The fate of the dead and missing is not known to every family. The reasons for this can be completely different. But, fortunately, today this information can be found out, even if no documents and photographs of the soldier have been preserved. Most of the archival files of the Great Patriotic War period have already been digitized and are stored in public databases on the Internet. With their help, you can trace the military path of a soldier, learn about his injuries, awards, place and circumstances of death, burial place.
The father of my husband's mother was called to the front in July 1941 and died in one of the first battles, - shared the journalist of the Svoykirovsky portal Valentina Rogacheva. - Mother came to the funeral - "Dead." But neither the place of burial, nor any information at all was not. Then the Germans burned down the village where my mother-in-law's family lived during the retreat, and there was no data at all about her father: no photographs, no documents - everything burned down. All her life she dreamed of at least something to know about her father. And so, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Victory, I learned in the news that the data of soldiers of the Great Patriotic War were being digitized. We started looking for information on the Internet. All that we knew was the full name, year of birth and year of conscription. In one of the public databases, they found him in the lists of those buried in a mass grave on the territory of Belarus and a postscript stating that he died in battle. And although the place of burial is not entirely certain, it is now at least clear that he died not in captivity, but in battle, that he was buried, albeit in a mass grave.
So, all you need to know for the first stage of the search is the last name, first name and patronymic of the deceased or missing person, his date and place of birth. This can be obtained from relatives. It is also desirable to know where the soldier was called.
What databases can be used
There are four main databases with documents digitized from the archives, which are constantly updated:
- . A generalized data bank on the dead and missing during the Great Patriotic War and the post-war period. The personal information contained in them is more than 20 million records;
- . The data bank contains 12.5 million entries on awarding orders and medals "For Courage" (about 4.6 million people were awarded) and "For Military Merit" (more than 5.2 million people were awarded), as well as 22 million cards of the accounting award card index and file cabinets of awarding the Orders of the Patriotic War I and II degree to the 40th anniversary of the Victory;
- . The portal was created by the Ministry of Defense by decision of the Russian Organizing Committee "Victory". It summarizes the data banks "Memorial" and "The feat of the people in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945." Here you can see historical maps and combat logs;
- - website of the all-Russian movement "Immortal Regiment". Users upload data about their front-line relatives on their own. At the moment, there are more than 400 thousand records in the Immortal Regiment database.
Screenshot from obd-memorial.ru
However, it is worth keeping in mind a few points. Firstly, the name of a soldier could be written incorrectly when entering the front (for example, Snigirev instead of Snegirev, Kiril instead of Kirill), the same applies to the date of birth (some recruits themselves asked to change their age in order to get to the front). So if you can’t find a person by the exact full name and date of birth, you can try to write the last name as it would be perceived by ear, and change the year of birth by a couple of years upward or downward. Secondly, if you are looking for information on the place of conscription or birth, you need to remember that the administrative-territorial division of the regions of the RSFSR has changed. For example, Oparinsky, Lalsky and Podosinovsky districts were included in the Kirov region only in 1941, and before that they belonged to the Arkhangelsk region. You can check the administrative division on the website, and you can learn more about the intricacies of searching through databases.
In addition to databases on the Internet, there are also Books of Memory. These are large printed publications in several volumes, in which the dead during the Great Patriotic War are listed by name (in alphabetical order). There are such books in every region: in Kirov you can ask for them in the library named after Herzen. It may be that the name of your relative is not in any of the databases, nor in the Book of Memory. In this case, you can try to send the official one by mail (!) to the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. But for this you need to know more accurate information about the deceased (for example, in which part he served) and you will have to wait about six months for an answer.By the way, in rare cases, you can also find letters from the front. For example, on websites and or in the digitized “Letters from the Front” (you need to view it manually). But you have to search by last name and initials.
What if a soldier goes missing?
The count of the missing during the Great Patriotic War is still being carried out. Various researchers call the figure from 4 to 7 million people. It is difficult to determine the exact number, since in front-line reports the missing were sometimes combined with prisoners or entered into lists with the total number of losses. About 500 thousand people were mobilized in the first days of the war, but were not included in the lists of troops. Some families received neither letters from the front, nor "funerals".
Information about the missing person can also be stored in one of the open databases. First of all, it is still the same OBD "Memorial". If you have information that a soldier was captured, try typing his first and last name in Latin (Ivan Petrov). In addition, there is a separate electronic data of prisoners of war - Saxon Memorials.Those who fell into German captivity are listed in alphabetical order. If the German camp in which the prisoner of war was located was liberated by the Soviet troops, after the end of the war, such a person could end up in the NKVD check-filtration camp. Alas, there is an electronic database of PFL prisoners only for natives of the Perm Territory. You can try to find filtration and verification cases and captured German cards through the State Archives of the Kirov Region
Search teams can also help in finding information about the missing. Since 1989, “Memory Watches” have been held in the regions where there were hostilities, during which search engines raise the fallen soldiers, identify them, and then search for relatives throughout the country. Some keep documents that help identify a person, in rare cases, letters to relatives or personal items with a signature (for example, a spoon). But, as a rule, a person can be identified by a soldier's medallion - a small metal capsule into which a piece of paper with the soldier's data was inserted.
Photo: serovglobus.ru
It indicated the name, military rank, year and place of birth, place of mobilization and family address. An archive of records from all found medallions can be found on the Internet: they are entered in special books - “Names from Soldiers' Medallions”, which are published on the Search Movement of Russia. Having found a familiar name in the lists, you can find out when, where and by whom the fighter was found. If the record contains information that the relatives of the deceased have been found, you can request their contacts in the search party. You can also search for information by the name of the fighter.
And now briefly:
1. We find out from the relatives of the deceased his full name, place and date of birth, as well as the year and place of conscription.
2. Looking for information in databases. First of all, through OBD "Memorial". We are trying to type a full name with errors: the way they are perceived by ear.
3. We are looking for additional information: we find out the soldier’s combat path and awards on the website “Memory of the People”.
4. We are looking for digitized or decoded front-line letters on the Internet by the name of a fighter.
It should be noted that the search for the burial place or the military path of one's grandfather / great-grandfather is a long, sometimes difficult, sometimes expensive business. From the very beginning, you need to tune in to a long painstaking work of collecting information and analyzing it.
However, in general, it is a simple and straightforward process.
Data collection
Specify the last name, first name, patronymic, year of birth, place of birth, place of residence before the war, military registration and enlistment office, address of relatives, place of service, military rank, party membership, if there are letters - find the field mail number in them if we are looking for a dead or missing missing - specify the date of the last known letter.
Read the letters carefully, they may contain important information: about the type of troops, about the military unit, any details of movements.
Type of troops, military unit - regiment, division, army - this information is sometimes the key to finding, for example, burial
Primary Search
The base is unique, there are no analogues in the world. About 14 million sheets of archival documents were scanned and posted. Work on filling the database continues. Therefore, do not be surprised if there is no data for your relative yet.
Here you can find all possible (taking into account the fact that the database is filling up) references to a person: Books of memory, reports of losses, lists of the buried, etc.
The database contains almost all military graves where soldiers and commanders of the Red Army are buried. From Murmansk to Crete.
Additional information can be obtained on the website "Feat of the People". There is information about the awards.
If you know about the awards of a relative, then from the award documents you can find out information about the military unit, place of birth, etc. And, of course, about exploits.
In addition, the "Feat of the People" has a section on the Geography of War. In this section, you can find information about the combat path of the military unit.
If you want to know where your grandfather fought, who lived to see the end of the war, this is the main tool. But only if he was awarded.
Books of Memory
In every region of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, a multi-volume "Book of Memory" has been published. The Book contains information about those who did not return from the war. But! Information at the time of the publication of the Book, and the information that the regional commissariat then had. Some of the books have been reprinted.
"Book of Memory" is kept in the district military commissariat. It is necessary to contact at the place of recruitment your relative..
There is an easier way to access the "Book of Memory" - contact the Veterans Council. There, active grandparents will give you the "Book" and give you more tea.
Memory books can also be electronic. Then a link to them must be sought on the websites of the central authorities of the region.
Most of the Memory Books have been digitized and are in the Memorial OBD. In the "Advanced Search" section, a search for these Books is available.
Request to TsAMO
If the previous search did not give the desired results - send by registered mail request to the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense - 142100, Moscow region, Podolsk, st. Kirov, house 74.
The request looks like this:
======================================
142100, Podolsk, Moscow Region
Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
QUESTIONNAIRE-INQUIRY
on the search and establishment of the fate of a serviceman
1. Surname, name, patronymic (wanted)
________________________
________________________
________________________
2. Year and place of birth (region, district, village, city) _______________________________
3. Where he lived and worked before the call (indicate the detailed address and name of the institution, enterprise) _________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
4. By what military registration and enlistment office was called, when and to which part he was sent _____________________
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
5. Military rank ______________________________
6. Type of troops (by conscription and service) _________________________________________________
7. Party membership _________________________________
8. When written communication ceased (year, month, day) _____________________________
9. Address of the military unit at the last place of service (last letter) ___________
10. Who requests (last name, first name, patronymic, family relationship, home address)
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
Applicant's signature - _________________
Reception led by __________________________
“______”_________20___
Request in the form of a word file.=============================================================
After some time, you receive an official certificate of the place of burial.
It will say:
1. Killed (indicating the place of burial)
2. Killed (without specifying the place of burial)
3. Died from wounds (indicating the place of burial)
4. Died of wounds (without specifying the place of burial)
5. Missing.
If you know the place of burial, then take one more step:
After receiving an official certificate, write a request to the district military registration and enlistment office of the place of burial (depending on the accuracy of the indication).
Head of the military registration and enlistment office of the Demyansky district of the Novgorod region
We ask you to establish the place of burial _______FULL NAME______, check it according to the passports of burials based on the information we have from
1) Notice of death ____________
2) OBD Memorial (listing of documents) _____________
Copies of documents attached _____________
If there is no data on the full name in the burial passport, please enter the full name in the burial passport and perpetuate his name
Copies do not need to be certified, regular copies are sufficient.
If a specific burial is indicated in the certificate, then you are looking for it using the OBD "Memorial" - Advanced search, Search for burials
If the place of burial is unknown, then we do the following:
Died from wounds
Request to the archive of military medical documents of the Military Medical Museum of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (191180, St. Petersburg, Lazaretny per. 2) and a second request to TsAMO with a request to clarify the location of the hospital for the period of death of the wanted person.
Very often, the passport of military burials (if it is hospital) contains information about the hospital.
If there is any information about the hospital, then - a guide to the deployment of hospitals of the Red Army in 1941-1945.
Killed or missing.
This is where the fun begins. You should be aware of the part in which your grandfather fought. This will be in the certificate from TsAMO or in the unified database "Memorial". Your task is to establish the combat path of the division\brigade\regiment. Not armies, but divisions / brigades / regiments.
If there are letters and they contain a field mail number, then we decrypt this number.
If a part is known, then further - memoirs, maps, reports on hostilities, and so on. You can search TsAMO for reports and orders for a narrow period of time. It is quite realistic, for example, to establish the fate of an individual tank, and from aerial photographs to suggest the place of his death, and after a survey of the local population, to establish a previously unknown grave. But this is jewelry work, and most likely the local search squad can do it.
Burials
Sometimes, the military registration and enlistment office cannot give a complete picture, especially for the battles of 1941-1942. The maximum that they can give in this case is a map of the area's burials. But there could be dozens of them.
Keep in mind that the burials have been enlarged. Consolidation campaigns were held in the country 2-3 times. They are still being carried out now, the main reason is the transport inaccessibility and the impossibility of leaving.
The history of burials can also be traced by the OBD "Memorial". Sometimes, lists of graves are posted on official websites.
It may be that the burial was transferred only on paper. And where it really is - everyone forgot.
The mass grave, created in 1941 and noted in the documents, can simply "dissolve" on the ground during 2 years of occupation. Or it may be that the person you are looking for will be listed in several graves.
Museums.
School and local history. No matter how strange it may seem to someone, but school museums exist and are actively working on specific units and units. The most complete list of school military history museums is located.
Search squads
It is necessary to contact the search squad of your district / city, as well as the search squad of the area where your relative died / went missing.
On request in Yandex like "Demyansky search squad" usually everything is also found.
If there is no information on the Internet, call the Department of Youth Affairs of the desired region and you will be given all the information available on the search teams in the region.
Material from the Family Navigator
OBD "Memorial"- a generalized electronic data bank (OBD) containing information about Soviet soldiers who died, died and went missing during the Great Patriotic War, as well as in the post-war period. The database was created by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (Ministry of Defense of Russia), the technical part of the project was implemented by the Electronic Archive Corporation.
Since 2007, it has been in the public domain on the Internet at: http://www.obd-memorial.ru. Flash 9 is required to view the database.
History of creation
Work on the OBD "Memorial" was started in accordance with the List of Instructions of the President of the Russian Federation dated April 23, 2003 No. pr-698 on the organization of military memorial work in the Russian Federation and Decree No. 37 dated January 22, 2006 "Issues of perpetuating the memory of those killed during defense of the Fatherland".
- In 2006-2008, the Military Memorial Center of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (Russian Armed Forces) carried out work that was unique in terms of scale, technology and deadlines, as a result of which an information and reference system was created that has no analogues in world practice. OBD was created by scanning, processing and entering into the Internet information retrieval system archival documents stored in the Central Archive of the Russian Ministry of Defense and in the Military Memorial Center of the Russian Armed Forces.
- By 2008, within the framework of the project, about 10,000,000 sheets of archival documents and over 30,000 passports of military graves were scanned and made available on the Internet. The personal information contained in them amounted to more than 20,000,000 records (often several records refer to the same person).
- In 2008, the second stage of work began: clarifying information on specific persons and combining records from different sources related to one person. Thanks to the feedback system, Memorial users can also report inaccuracies in the database or send their additions.
In the future, the OBD is planned to be supplemented with information relating to the dead and missing soldiers during other military conflicts of the 20th century, which is stored in the archives of the Russian Federation.
Presentation of information in OBD
The main goal of the project is to enable millions of citizens to determine the fate or find information about their dead or missing relatives and friends, to determine the place of their burial. In the course of the creation of the Memorial OBD, funds 58 and 33 (“Reports of combat units on irretrievable losses” and a card file for recording Soviet prisoners of war) stored in the TsAMO of Russia, as well as documents from the “Passports of Burials” fund stored in the VMTs Armed Forces of Russia were processed.
The main array of processed documents are:
- reports of combat units on irretrievable losses,
- other archival documents specifying the losses (funerals, documents of hospitals and medical sanitary battalions (medical battalions), trophy cards of Soviet prisoners of war, etc.),
- burial passports of Soviet soldiers and commanders (officers).
Each entry in the OBD contains the last name, first name, patronymic, date of birth, date of departure and place of birth of the serviceman (provided that all of them are indicated in the document). Moreover, the site contains scanned copies of all source documents containing information about persons. They often contain additional data, including the names and addresses of relatives to whom the funeral was sent.
Access restriction problem
From January 28, 2010, access to some information about personalities was limited due to the entry into force of Federal Laws of June 27, 2006 No. 152-FZ “On Personal Data” (as amended, Article 9 and Article 19), and also dated October 22, 2004 No. 125-FZ “On Archiving in the Russian Federation” (as amended by Article 25). As reported on the WDS website, information that could serve as a reason to belittle the dignity of the person, honor and reputation of soldiers (about people who went over to the side of the German troops, about those convicted by a military tribunal, etc.). was replaced by general wording (“sent to the front line” and another reason for leaving, death), and access to viewing electronic copies of documents was limited, on which, in addition to the specifically wanted warrior, you can see information on other people with the above reasons for leaving.
This measure caused a wide discussion, soon a letter was published on the Soldat.ru website to the President of Russia D. A. Medvedev with a request to look into the situation and restore users' access to OBD information. The letter was signed by the search engines of Russia, the CIS countries and the Baltic States, relatives of the dead and missing soldiers, and members of the public. Several thousand signatures were left under the letter on the Soldat.ru website, as well as on the forum of the VGD website, and the letter was also posted on the President's blog.
On February 9, 2010, the news program of the NTV channel showed a story about the closure of some information in the OBD; In an interview with an NTV correspondent, Alexander Kirillov, head of the Russian Defense Ministry's Directorate for Perpetuating the Memory of Those Who Died in Defense of the Fatherland, said that the department plans to deal with the situation during February, since "the database was not created to host and close it."
At the beginning of March 2010, a message appeared on the OBD website stating that the restrictions on working with information were lifted, since the Main Legal Directorate of the Russian Ministry of Defense analyzed this issue and decided that the information on the Memorial website does not fall under the above laws and free access it should be restored.
In the Great Patriotic War, a huge number of Soviet citizens died, died of wounds, disappeared without a trace. These are people from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and many other countries of the former USSR. Until now, the fate of many people who died in that war remained unknown. To this day, the search for places of great battles and the burial of dead soldiers continues. By order of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, a generalized data bank (obd-memorial.ru) was created, which contains lists of missing persons. OBD Memorial contains almost 17 million copies of documents in digital form, as well as about 21 million records of the dead of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War.
Main page of the site www.obd-memorial.ruWhat you need to know about www.obd-memorial.ru
The Obd-memorial.ru service was created in 2006. The data bank was formed by entering authentic documentary data into the system.
Enormous work was done: hundreds of thousands of documents were entered into electronic form, the volume of which amounted to about 10 million sheets in paper equivalent, they contained 20 million personal records. The main information of the documents is the burial places of soldiers and officers, background information about the missing, information and battles, personnel of some units, etc. Data was collected from various sources, including German data on prisoners of war.
To date, the database of the OBD "Memorial" lists of the missing contains more than 36 million copies of records of the dead, those who did not return from captivity, the missing. There are also about 10 million records of information from the Books of Memory.
All information that is contained in electronic form in the database on the service is replenished by the following archival funds (and other sources):
- Account books from various medical institutions about the dead and buried.
- Regional branches that contain information about Soviet prisoners of war soldiers who returned from captivity and died.
- Registration books of military registration and enlistment offices containing documents on the death of soldiers.
- Trophy funds, Russian State Archive.
How to search in the lists of the missing on the OBD Memorial website
The search window on obd-memorial.ru has several parts. If you do not select anything, the search will be performed on summary records. Such records are available for almost every person who is listed in any document. On the first search, summary information duplicates a single document. Therefore, when entering information in search strings, it is not desirable to include both the entry and any copy of the document in the same form.
The standard search block contains windows for entering basic data: first name, last name, date of birth, title. The more data you enter, the more accurate your search results will be and the faster your database will be searched.
Some properties of the search on the list of the missing on obd-memorial.ru:
- The fields are filled without case sensitivity. There is no difference between the letters "A" and "a". The search also does not perceive the difference between "e" and "e".
- Fields must be filled with at least two characters. Punctuation marks do not count as characters.
- When performing a search, you can use special characters to help expand or narrow the number of results for your query. For example, an asterisk (*) will help you find results with any ending after it - "Simonen*", the results will be "Simonenko", "Simonenkov", "Simonenkovich", etc. Quotation marks are used to search for a phrase, they resemble the root for a query, for example, “1944 An”. The plus symbol "+" is used to get only one result with this "root". For example, the next query "Simonen*" will get many answers with this "root", to get only one result for this query, put a plus sign "+Simonen*" in front of it.
Advanced search in the missing persons list
The Memorial website has an advanced search that makes it possible to find almost all participants in the Great Patriotic War using a wide variety of data.
Advanced search buttons Including searching by the basic data of the person you are looking for, there are also additional fields for entering military rank, place of conscription, camp number, country of burial, hospital of stay, place of captivity, date of death, etc. Near each field there is a search method: full-text search, exact phrase, exact field, from the beginning of the field. Enter the data in the required field, then select the search method from the drop-down menu.
Advanced search with additional data 
On the left side of the advanced search window is a list of documents and sections in which you want to search.
Choose where to search By default, all existing military documents are selected in www.obd-memorial.ru. If necessary, you can add a search in file cabinets, in printed memory books, digital memory books, exhumation protocols, in the search for burials, as well as in free records for all documents.
