Уважаемые форумчане!
Открывается страница на сайте МККК, где размещены оцифрованные архивы Центрального агентства по розыску военнопленных, работавшего в период Первой мировой войны (на англ. и фр. языках). Пользователи смогут искать военнопленных по национальности или по фамилии.
Информация на английском, извините, пока не могу сделать перевод.
Public opening of the International Prisoners of War Agency (IPWA) web platform on 4 August: http://www.icrc.org/ww1 The archives of the International Prisoners of War Agency (IPWA), a body created during the early days of the First World War by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), bear witness to the scale of the suffering endured by victims of the war across the world. Seven million soldiers were taken prisoner, large numbers of civilians were interned on enemy soil and millions more endured military occupation or were forced to flee combat zones or occupied territories.
The objective of the IPWA was to centralize information about prisoners of war in order to pass it on to their loved ones and help restore contact between family members. It was a huge task: during and after the war, IPWA volunteers made index cards and lists of nearly two and a half million prisoners of war, preserving more than five millions index cards and 500 000 register pages.
In connection with the commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, the ICRC has made digital copies of thousands of index cards and other documents in the IPWA archives which it will make available on a new web platform to be launched on 4 August.
In addition to containing general documents relating to ICRC negotiations with States on conditions of detention, the platform will enable users to search index cards and lists produced by the IPWA during the war. It will also include historical postcards from France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and elsewhere, and certain ICRC reports on the conditions in which prisoners of war were being held in Europe, Egypt, India, Russia and Japan. The index cards and general archives, which have been entirely restored, are included in the Memory of the World Register of UNESCO.
The web platform will allow users to search for prisoners by nationality or by family name. Because of the way the index cards were originally organized, however, users may find that searches are not entirely straightforward; that is why a tutorial is available to guide them. The site will be steadily updated over the coming six months as further information is placed online, but it already offers access to all civilian-internee index cards and to 80 per cent of the cards for military prisoners from Belgium, France, the United Kingdom and Germany. Cards containing tracing requests made by families during the First World War can also already be consulted.
The new web platform offers a unique way to discover our common history, thanks above all to the fact that one hundred years ago, all over the world and despite the general chaos, military forces, civil society, and National Red Cross Societies cooperated with the ICRC in a joint effort to restore contact between family members.
English:
http://www.icrc.org/ww1Français:
http://www.icrc.org/grandeguerre For more information , please contact:
David-Pierre Marquet, ICRC Library and Public Archives, tel: +41 22 730 2221
