In 2014, a descendant of Volga Germans who had moved to Germany under the repatriation programme decided to trace the fate of his grandfather — an ethnic German deported in 1941 from the Saratov region to Kazakhstan along with his entire family. A search through Soviet archives turned up only a terse certificate of special resettlement, but the researcher then approached Germany's Bundesarchiv — and unexpectedly found a 1943 questionnaire from an entirely different agency: it turned out that one of the grandfather's brothers, who had remained in occupied Ukraine, had at that time gone through registration as a Volksdeutscher and filled in a detailed genealogical questionnaire requiring information on ancestors going back several generations. A document created by Nazi racial bureaucracy had, ironically, become for his descendants one of the most detailed genealogical sources about the family's nineteenth century.
The German Wehrmacht loss-tracing office (Deutsche Dienststelle, WASt) was created by the Nazi regime in 1939 to centrally track the fate of every serviceman — wounded, killed, captured, or missing. After the war the office continued operating in West Berlin, responding to inquiries from relatives and researchers throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and in 2019 it was formally absorbed into the Federal Archives of Germany (Bundesarchiv). A Wehrmacht serviceman's personal file may include his date and place of birth, details of wounds and decorations, and, in the case of captivity, the exact camp and, if he did not survive, his date of death.
Separate from WASt is the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg — Germany's largest military archive, holding documents at the level of units and formations: war diaries, table-of-organisation records, operational maps. If a specific person's personal file sits in the former WASt's holdings, the context of his service — which battles his unit fought, where it moved — has to be sought specifically in Freiburg, meaning two separate archival requests rather than one.
A special category of sources concerns ethnic Germans who lived within the territory of the USSR — the Volga region, the Black Sea area, Volhynia, the Caucasus. From 1939 to 1944, the Nazi administration carried out a large-scale resettlement campaign (Umsiedlung) of ethnic Germans from annexed and occupied territories, and every resettler underwent registration through the Reich Office for Immigration (Einwandererzentralstelle, EWZ). Registration required proof of 'racial' membership, and to provide it an applicant had to fill in a detailed genealogical questionnaire — effectively a family tree spanning several generations, listing the names, dates and birthplaces of ancestors.
EWZ documents are held today at the Bundesarchiv and a substantial portion has been digitised; for the descendants of Volga, Black Sea and Volhynian Germans, they are among the most detailed genealogical sources of the twentieth century, since the ordinary parish registers of these communities were often lost amid deportations, resettlements and the war itself, whereas a particular ancestor's EWZ questionnaire can preserve the same information a lost register would have held, filled in by their own hand.
The main EWZ transit and registration point was located at Litzmannstadt (today's Łódź), through which historians estimate some 350,000 to 400,000 resettlers from various parts of Eastern Europe passed; for those specifically from USSR territory, smaller registration points closer to their places of expulsion also existed. Beyond the genealogical questionnaire, the procedure included a loyalty interview and a medical examination — all three types of document may today be held separately even within a single person's file, so for a complete picture it's worth requesting the full set from the Bundesarchiv, not just the questionnaire on ancestry. We plan to cover the structure and history of the Umsiedlung campaign in a dedicated article of its own — what matters here above all is that these documents exist and are available on genealogical request.
The German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge) was founded back in 1919, after the First World War, and continues its work to this day, maintaining military cemeteries and running an online database of German servicemen who died in both world wars. Unlike WASt, which issues archival certificates on formal request, the Volksbund database is open for free search by surname directly on the organisation's website, and frequently indicates the specific military cemetery and grave number where remains were later identified and reinterred.
Of nearly three million German servicemen taken prisoner by the Soviets, estimates vary but at least a third did not return home. The fate of those who did return (Heimkehrer) after 1955, when the last major wave of prisoners was repatriated under an agreement between West Germany and the USSR, was systematically studied by a special academic commission led by the historian Erich Maschke — its multi-volume report, published in the 1960s and 1970s, remains the principal source of statistics on the fate of German prisoners of war in Soviet camps and frequently includes lists of specific camps with mortality figures broken down by year.
In the occupied territories of Poland, and partly of Ukraine, the German administration introduced a separate system for classifying the local population by degree of membership in the German nation — the Deutsche Volksliste, which sorted people into four categories based on origin, language, and presumed loyalty. An application for inclusion on the list required documentary proof of German ancestry, and applicants frequently attached to their questionnaire extracts from church registers later lost, or a hand-compiled genealogy drawing on oral family knowledge of ancestors. For today's researcher, a specific person's Volksliste file, held in Poland's regional archives and partly at the Bundesarchiv, sometimes turns out to be the only surviving written trace of a parish register burned or lost during the war.
After 1945, as millions of ethnic Germans were deported, evacuated, or fled from Eastern European territories, Germany's church tracing services (Kirchlicher Suchdienst) created the Heimatortskartei (HOK) — a vast card index organised not by surname but by the name of a home settlement. A separate card section was opened for each German colony of the Volga region, the Black Sea area, or Volhynia, recording details of every known native of that village, including date and place of birth and — particularly important — information on their post-war whereabouts, where this had been established through refugee-tracing services.
This index arose as a purely practical tool for reuniting relatives separated by the war, but for present-day genealogical research it often serves as a way around the absence of the parish register itself: knowing only the colony's name, one can locate the HOK section for that village and find within it a mention of a specific family, even where the original church birth record has not survived at all. Part of the HOK holdings have since been transferred to the Bundesarchiv and to the regional archives of Volga German and Black Sea German heritage associations.
Category
Where to search
What to know
Personal file of a Wehrmacht serviceman
Bundesarchiv (former WASt)
Direct archival request; a reply may take several months
Unit records (war diaries)
Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg
A separate archive and a separate request from the personal file
Ethnic Germans from the USSR, EWZ registration
Bundesarchiv, fonds R 69
Contains detailed genealogical questionnaires; partly digitised
War graves and burial sites
volksbund.de
Free online search by surname directly on the site
German wartime archives display an unexpected thoroughness precisely because of a bureaucratic discipline that, at the time, served purposes entirely unrelated to the interests of later descendants. Understanding which office was responsible for which category of documents turns a scattered set of archival holdings into a coherent path of research.
WASt / Deutsche Dienststelle — the German Wehrmacht loss-tracing office, created in 1939; part of the Federal Archives of Germany (Bundesarchiv) since 2019.
Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv — Germany's military archive in Freiburg, holding documents at the level of military units and formations.
EWZ (Einwandererzentralstelle) — the Reich Office for Immigration, which registered ethnic Germans resettled from annexed and occupied territories in 1939–1944.
Volksdeutsche — ethnic Germans living outside pre-war Germany, including within the territory of the USSR.
Hiwi (Hilfswillige) — auxiliary volunteer formations attached to the Wehrmacht, recruited in part from the local population of occupied territories.
Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge — the German War Graves Commission, founded in 1919, which runs an online database of German servicemen who died in the World Wars.
Heimkehrer — German prisoners of war who returned home from foreign captivity after the end of the war.
Maschke Commission — an academic commission led by historian Erich Maschke that studied the fate of German prisoners of war in Soviet captivity.
Deutsche Volksliste — a classification system applied to the local population of occupied territories according to degree of membership in the German nation, introduced by the Nazi administration.
Heimatortskartei (HOK) — a post-war card index maintained by Germany's church tracing services, organised by the name of resettlers' and refugees' home settlements.