Captured German military records online: "germandocsinrussia.org"

[Art]

A site with digitized WWII German military documents captured by the Soviet Army:
http://wwii.germandocsinrussia.org/de/nodes/1-fond-500
Free access, Russian and German interface. The work on digitizing and uploading docs still in progress. Thus far folders with documents originating from OKW, OKH and Heeresgruppe Mitte are uploaded.

[Michate]

This contains some most interesting material.

Kudos to the Russians for making all this available online for free.

[AMVAS]

This contains some most interesting material.

Kudos to the Russians for making all this available online for free.

This is a result of German-Russian cooperation. Previously the 500th Fund of TsAMO had even no clear catalogue and it was more than hard to work inside.

[Piet Duits]

I know from one of the main archivists in Freiburg (BA-MA) how hard it was to get access despite federal agreements.

[Mr.No one]

This is effing awesome material!!
This is gonna take me weeks to plow through, wonderful!

How fantastic that it has finally been possible to get the material out, especially when it is given for free!!!

Kudos to Germany and especially Russia for doing this!!

— Sean

[Michate]

This is a result of German-Russian cooperation. Previously the 500th Fund of TsAMO had even no clear catalogue and it was more than hard to work inside.

Thanks for the correction. Anyway, then this is how international cooperation should look like.

Let's hope even more material will be made available in the future, like e.g. those parts of field army records not available at BAMA or NARA.

[AMVAS]

Thanks for the correction. Anyway, then this is how international cooperation should look like.

Let's hope even more material will be made available in the future, like e.g. those parts of field army records not available at BAMA or NARA.

They have plans to upload more materials up to 2018 year. So, I guess there will be plenty absolutely new records

[StefanSiverud]

Fantastic stuff!
Is there any way to download entire books or do we have to download each page separately? The ones I'm interested in so far are only 10-20 pages long, but that's still a lot of clicks and a lot of files...

[Tom Peters]

The download process can likely be automated using a macro script recorder - this is what I used to copy files from fold3. hover, it would be nice if I didn't have to write the script up.

Mad Dog

[Urmel]

The project is supposed to finish in 2018, so there should be lots more to come.

[Mori]

About saving it all quickly, there was a discussion on the FMS thread. You can try DownthemAll or SaveImages (both being firefox extensions).

I tried Downthemall on the site: it works. But, they labelled their files with such weird names that you get a pile of documents in semi-random order. Everything is in your hard drive, but utterly mixed up...

I haven't tried Saveimages yet, as I could only make it work with the Mac version of Firefox.

[AMVAS]

One can try package download using some download agent. In FlashGet, which I prefer it's easy to make such trick. I set a link mask and a counter and then easily download necessary pages.
I hope this must work here too

[BramvanS]

I have tried everything, but the most efficient way remains a manual download including an immediate numbering of the downloaded files. I downloaded all OKH Insp der Pz Tr stuff and all KStN. It took a lot of time.

[StefanSiverud]

Yeah, each file needs to be renamed even when saving manually as the generated file names appear completely random, but as mentioned they are at least in order (if page 1 is .../pages/94347/..., page 2 is .../pages/94348/...).

Another tip: The zoom level for the files downloaded can be set between 1 and 7 (8 and above seems to be locked unless logged in). The "medium" size preset is 4, the "large" preset is 7. The zoom level when downloading the file is seen in the end of the URL, for instance wwii.germandocsinrussia.org/pages/94349/zooms/7 for the high resolution.
To save space on my hard drive, I download the smallest resolution that is easily readable. Usually the medium (4) preset is good enough, but due to JPG artefacts, changing the number to 5 works better for some texts where the font size is smaller. This requires manually changing the URL, but it's worth it. For machine printed texts, this gives me image files that works satisfactory with OCR scanners, meaning I can do text searches in processed files later.
I still haven't found a way to set different presets, and I assume it's locked.

Thanks for the suggestions on download managers, perhaps they will help automate the procedure even further. I will have to try them to see. The problem I've had with similar services previously is they always download too much (putting unnecessary strain on the host's servers and connection and filling my harddrive with things I don't need or want) and I still have to go through sorting and renaming everything manually.

[AMVAS]

..

Thanks for the suggestions on download managers, perhaps they will help automate the procedure even further. I will have to try them to see. The problem I've had with similar services previously is they always download too much (putting unnecessary strain on the host's servers and connection and filling my harddrive with things I don't need or want) and I still have to go through sorting and renaming everything manually.

I use to write my own software sometimes to make automatic downloading.
Seems Pamyat-naroda.ru site also will need me finally to do the same, because it can help making autmoatic naming of folders and files