Nineteen million documents stored in the archives of Russia’s Defence Ministry have been digitalised. The aim of the project was to help people find relatives killed or never found during World War II.

Now, the website www.obd-memorial.ru (in Russian ; via Google Translate) allows people looking for their lost friends and relatives to carry out their own investigations into what happened.

Records include not only the name, date and place of birth and death, but also scans of original documents.