A Research-Grade WWII Archive
Curated by 19 working historians. Cited by leading universities, the Imperial War Museum, and seven Emmy-winning documentary teams.
This Week in the Archive
Each was acquired, OCR-verified, and cataloged by our editorial board within the last nine days — the average turnaround from acquisition to fully transcribed.
A pencil-annotated typescript from the brigade major to XXX Corps headquarters, detailing stalled armour, civilian evacuation along Route D6, and a request for air cover at first light. Hand-drawn map inset on page 2.
3 pp. · English · Transcribed 8 days ago
Decoded signal traffic from Bletchley Park's Hut 8, released under the 2020 declassification schedule. Includes a hand-keyed Luftwaffe meteorology schedule and four outbound tasking messages.
7 pp. · English & German · Transcribed 6 days ago
An internal U.S. Marine Corps review authored by Lt. Col. Merritt A. Edson, with appended officer testimonies and revised boat-section diagrams. Frequently cited in Pacific theatre doctrine papers.
12 pp. · English · Transcribed 9 days ago
The Archive at a Glance
Every number below reflects what is in the index today — verified by the editorial board and updated as new material is transcribed.
184,732
Primary documents indexed
Letters, dispatches, after-action reports, SIGINT transcripts — searchable across 12 languages.
2,400
Interactive campaign maps
Updated quarterly with georeferenced overlays from open-source intelligence teams.
1,100hrs
Veteran oral histories
Uncut recordings, 62% of which appear in no other public archive.
38
Staff, including 19 historians
Plus 7 cartographers and 4 full-time translators on the editorial team.
Trusted by 312 universities and 47 national-level archives across 28 countries.
Indexed pages: 14.2 million · Median document load: under 380ms.
Editor's Pick
Between January 1943 and April 1945, our editorial team — together with partners at the Bundesarchiv and the Polish Institute of National Remembrance — has reconstructed a near-continuous chain of decoded radio traffic between German Army Group Center and its subordinate panzer corps. What makes the collection unusual is not its volume (considerable, though it is) but its granularity: the transcripts preserve the hour-by-hour decision-making of operational commanders as the front contracted and reconstituted across three brutal winters.
Backed by a 2022 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, this is the largest single digitization project in our archive — and the one I find myself returning to most often when teaching operational history.
Open the Collection
Institutional Standing
The institutions below license from, partner with, or formally cite WW2 Total in published research and teaching.
Department of War Studies — confirmed partnership for the Eastern Front oral history series.
CGSC, Fort Leavenworth — cited as a primary source for officer intermediate-level education.
Pacific theatre partnership — joint indexing of post-1945 veteran testimony.
Licensing partner for 312 hours of previously uncut British veteran recordings.
Winner of the 2023 Digital Humanities Award (Best Reference Resource) · Featured in The Atlantic's 2024 "Tools That Changed How We Read History" roundup · Featured in Apple Podcasts' "New & Noteworthy" history category three times.
Start Reading
Create a free account to read 38,000+ primary documents, listen to 220 hours of oral history, and open every public map. A premium subscription unlocks the full 184,732-document index, the uncut veteran recordings, and quarterly intelligence overlays.
No credit card required for the free tier. 94% of subscribers stay year-over-year.
