Three new reference tools on our website
Three new reference tools have recently been added to the website of Stichting Oorlogsslachtoffers. Our website has so far been mainly known for its databases of war victims: those of the war cemetery in Ysselsteyn, of all war victims from and in the municipality of Deurne, and of the victims of Operation Greif. From now on, you can also find three searchable reference tools that can help interpret German military documents and objects from the Second World War.
These tools are primarily intended for anyone researching a family member, or trying to interpret a letter, postcard, identity tag, or other object found from this period; genealogists, researchers, and relatives.
Feldpostnummern
A Feldpostnummer was a unique number used by the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War to identify a soldier’s unit on mail, instead of stating the exact location of the troops ,this was done to keep military information secret. Each number refers to a specific unit, and because units were regularly renamed, merged, or relocated, the same Feldpostnummer could be assigned to different units over the course of the war.
A Feldpostnummer usually consisted of a 5-digit number, followed by a 1- or 2-letter suffix (A, B, C, AB, and so on). Our database contains over 220,000 Feldpostnummern, along with the corresponding unit and the period during which that number was assigned to that unit.
Have you come across a Feldpostnummer on a field postcard or letter, for example? Look it up and find out which unit the sender served in.
Go to the Feldpostnummern database
Wehrmacht abbreviations
German Erkennungsmarken (identity tags) from the Second World War often carry heavily abbreviated designations of the unit, branch, or service to which the wearer belonged. Because of the limited space on the tags, the names of units, branches, and services were reduced to short, sometimes cryptic abbreviations, which can make it considerably harder to trace the origin of an Erkennungsmarke.
Our new reference tool contains over 2,100 such abbreviations along with their full meaning, and can help interpret an abbreviation found on an Erkennungsmarke, document, or other object.
Go to the Wehrmacht abbreviations
MOB numbers
Alongside Feldpostnummern, the German Wehrmacht also used so-called MOB numbers (mobilization numbers): secret code numbers that concealed the exact deployment location or the cover name of a military unit in wartime. They were mainly used on secret Erkennungsmarken.
Our database contains more than 5,000 MOB numbers, searchable together with the corresponding unit.
Don’t throw away history
Unfortunately, objects from the Second World War are often lost when parents or grandparents pass away. Letters or photographs from the war years, for instance, are sometimes found in attics, and people assume such personal items have no value. Do you, your parents, or grandparents still have objects or documents from the Second World War at home, or do you know someone who has them and isn’t doing anything with them? Let us know, we would be glad to preserve these objects and the stories that go with them, and make them accessible to everyone.
All three reference tools can be found at oorlogsslachtoffers.nl under “Reference”.