Russia’s Defence Ministry will finalize an electronic database of World War II losses by May 1, 2010, the chief of the ministry’s casualties commemoration department, Alexander Kirilin, said on Saturday.

“We started this work four years ago and we will finalise it by the 65th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany,” he told the audience of the Ekho Moskvy /Echo of Moscow/ radio station on Saturday. By May 1 we shall complete the electronic database, called Memorial, containing entries on all those who died or went missing in action in the war and over several post-war years,” he said. “In the future we shall update the database with information from other sources.”

The basic data were taken from 32,156 files kept at the Central Archive of Russia’s Defense Ministry and from about 500,000 German cards listing Soviet prisoners of war.

Users in about 179 states and 9,941 cities have visited the database already. The ministry has registered over five million requests from various Internet resources. About 8,000 users access the database every day.

The ministry says the losses the USSR’s armed forces sustained from 1941 through to 1945 at 8.86 million. To this figure the ministry will add data showing the losses of the NKVD (state security and internal affairs police agency) troops, local air defense units, special communication troops and rear security forces. The country’s overall losses in World War II are estimated at 26,600 thousand.

Source: ITAR-TASS World Service, February 27, 2010