A Research-Grade WWII Archive
The Archive — Browse 184,732 Primary Documents.
Indexed by a team of 19 historians. Full-text searchable across 12 languages. Open 38,000 documents without a subscription.
- Primary documents
- 184,732
- Indexed languages
- 12
- Free to read
- 38,000+
- Median load time
- under 380 ms
Faceted by five research axes
Pivot the index from any direction.
Every document carries five independently searchable facets — filter by theater, narrow to a single year, isolate a document type, choose a working language, or trace a holding institution back to its source archive.
- Theater 14 indexed Eastern · Western · Mediterranean · Pacific · CBI · Atlantic · Arctic · Home Fronts · and 6 more
- Year 1939 – 1947 Day-level granularity on dispatches and after-action reports; month-level on correspondence
- Document Type 42 types Letters · Dispatches · After-action reports · SIGINT transcripts · Maps · Memoranda · Press cables · and 35 more
- Language 12 indexed English · German · Russian · French · Japanese · Italian · Chinese · Polish · Dutch · Czech · Swedish · Spanish
- Source Archive 196 holdings Including the U.S. National Archives, the Imperial War Museum, Bundesarchiv, RGANI, and the Australian War Memorial research wing
Cross-facet filtering returns sub-second on a custom Elasticsearch index spanning 14.2 million transcribed pages.
A representative slice
Recent entries from the catalog.
A working preview of what a document card looks like — provenance, transcription, and access tier printed on the label, the way an archivist would file it.
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Free Tier
Doc. № A-041,872
Letter, Pvt. Edmund T. Halloran to his mother, describing conditions aboard the troop requisitioned liner Queen Mary, 6 February 1942
Cited in: Boston College graduate thesis, 2024 (private collection)
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Subscriber
Doc. № D-088,213
After-action report, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Operation Market — phase II, 18 September 1944
Cited in: King's College London, Department of War Studies seminar, 2025
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Free Tier
Doc. № S-101,649
SIGINT intercept transcript — Abwehr radio traffic, Bordeaux station, deciphered fragment, week of 12 March 1944
Cited in: Imperial War Museum podcast, season 4, episode 6
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Subscriber
Doc. № L-004,318
Dispatch, Maj. Gen. I. D. Grishin to Marshal K. Ye. Voroshilov concerning rail logistics, Leningrad Front, 14 January 1943
Cited in: U.S. Army CGSC curriculum, AY 2024–25
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Showing 4 of 184,732 indexed entries. Open the full catalog →
Researcher proof
Who is already pulling from this index.
A platform earns its citation-grade reputation by being cited. Three working voices from the institutions and documentary teams already using the archive.
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“WW2 Total pulled the Grishin dispatches out of RGANI, OCR-verified and human-transcribed, and put them in front of our seminar students with full provenance. That is the difference between a database and a research instrument.”
Partnership: King's College London Department of War Studies
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“When the 506th PIR reports surfaced indexed here in days, not months, it changed the writing timeline on the entire second episode. Our team uses the search the way an archivist would — by theater, by unit, by date — and it just answers.”
Documentary partnership: 7 Emmy-winning production teams
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“For our Eastern Front project, the editorial standard here is the highest I have seen outside of a national archive. Acquisition to publication in nine days, two-pass OCR — that lets us cite in good conscience.”
Partnership: U.S. Army Command and General Staff College curriculum
A note from the editorial board
On provenance, transcription, and the nine-day standard.
Every document in this archive carries a chain of custody the visitor can follow from the search results page back to the original folder in its source repository. We do not publish anything we cannot provenance.
Acquisition to fully transcribed, OCR-verified publication averages nine days across our 38-person staff — 19 historians, 7 cartographers, and 4 full-time translators on the languages the index searches in. Each document is reviewed by at least one credentialed historian before it is opened for reader access, and citations are deliberately machine-stable so a dissertation footnote from 2019 still resolves to the same record today.
If you find an error in transcription, attribution, or provenance, write to us. Corrections are issued under the editorial board's name and versioned on the record itself.
— Daniel H. Kessler, founder, on behalf of the editorial board. Washington, D.C., January 2026.
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