Archives abroad: The Ministry of Defense of Russia to open the representative office for the work with archives of the died military men during the World War II in the USA

The Ministry of Defense of Russia is to open the representative office in Washington in order to work with documents, relating to the fallen Soviet military men during the World War II.

"Our database contains German scanned documents relating to the dead and missing soldiers. But most of them are located in the federal archives of the United States", - said the head of the Ministry of Defense to perpetuate the memory of those killed in defense of the Fatherland Andrei Taranov.

The allies have taken these documents from their zone of occupation and they are in unsorted form. 

The office in 2006 created a joint electronic database "Memorial". It contains information about the Soviet soldiers killed and missing during the World War II and in the postwar period.

The database includes information about the rank of the deceased, the military unit in which people served, the date and cause of death, as well as the burial site. In addition, HBS includes scanned copies of all documents processed - primary sources containing information about the participants of the war.

Since 2007, HBS "Memorial" is publicly available in the Internet. At the beginning of May 2014 was scanned and included in the "Memorial" a little less than 14 million pages of archival documents and over 40,000 passports military graves.