Nawigacja

About us

"Bearing in mind the need to ensure the remembrance of the enormity of victims, losses and damages suffered by the Polish Nation during and after World War II", as was written in the preamble to the Act of 18 December 1998 on the Institute of National Remembrance - Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, the Center for Information on the Victims of World War II was established at the beginning of 2014, pursuant to the decision of the President of the Institute of National Remembrance.

 

Our main task is to help families who are looking for information about the fate of relatives repressed by the Third Reich and the Soviet Union in 1939-1956. Thanks to the archival resources collected and the unique databases available at the Institute, we are often able to restore it.

 

The functioning of the Center involves simplifying the rules of providing information and sharing documents - a query about the war history of a family member can be sent to us by e-mail, traditional mail, and now also via the contact form on this site. Our activity has a broader perspective. In addition to providing information on the victims of World War II, the collection of source documentation is also of great  importance. Currently, this is being done in cooperation with the team responsible for the Archive Full of Remembrance project.

 

Electronic databases are an extremely valuable supplement to the archival resource. They include, among others,  an application about the victims of German repression, obtained from the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen (now Arolsen Archives) in Germany and the databases of the "Index of the Repressed" obtained from the KARTA Center Foundation, documenting the fate of Polish citizens repressed by the USSR. The aids used also base on  a publicly available online database Personal losses and victims of repression under German occupation (http://www.straty.pl), run by the Polish-German Reconciliation Foundation and supervised by the Institute of National Remembrance.  

 

Every year, we receive thousands of inquiries. Thanks to modern search tools and increasing knowledge of the collected documentation, we can help families who have not been able to learn the fate of their loved ones for decades.

 

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