Germany & Austria, Directories of Military and Marine Officers, 1600-1918 (in German) 5,904,223: Germany, Military Killed in Action, 1939-1948 (in German) 2,488,380: Germany, Concentration Camp Records, 1946-1958 (in German) Free: 411,852: Germany & Austria, Directories of Military and Marine Officers, 1500-1939 (in German) 213,429: View all. Chances are if you bought a zine in the mid 90s, you would have seen an ad for Lost & Found Records out of Germany. Looking back, the label seriously ripped off nuermous bands yet bands continued to release records with him. Any information on how to access it would be appreciated.) Available in both English and German, it appears to be a German-run website that says it is dedicated to pilot and air-crew casualties with a database covering the period of 1935-1945. English and German flag icons allow you to pick whichever language you prefer for each page.

Approximately 4000 items are lost and found during the Oktoberfest period each year.
There are so many that the head of the Lost and Found office has said that it is possible to identify market trends from the lost and found items. For example in recent years, the number of lost mobile phones has increased considerably and in particular the number of “Apple” mobile phones.
A large part of the losses are attributable to the fairground rides… without being noticed where objects fall out of pockets and finding them is virtually impossible.
But the rides are not the only reason given the variety of lost and found items.
Jackets, glasses, glasses cases, pocket knives, crutches and bras are held until 31 January to be reclaimed by their respective owners after which they are stored.
The Lost and Found Office is located in the Oktoberfest Theresienwiese, opening hours are from 13.00 to 23.00 every day during the event.
When the event is over, a team of people begin to try and identify who the owners are, even if in the majority of cases the exercise is impossible and indeed, eighty percent of the items found are not returned.
The more unusual items found so far include a Viking helmet, a megaphone, false teeth, a wheelchair (difficult to comprehend), wedding rings and a giant grasshopper (intentionally recovered by the owner).

Alessandro Fico, è autore e blogger di Oktoberfest.net

Sadly this is still a issue. Many that served in Iraq and Afghanistan are having the same issues older veterans suffered...

The Army says it has taken steps to improve handling of records — including better training and more emphasis from top commanders. But officials familiar with the problem said the missing material may never be retrieved.

'I can't even start to describe the dimensions of the problem,' said Conrad C. Crane, director of the U.S. Army's Military History Institute. 'I fear we're never really going to know clearly what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan because we don't have the records.'

The Army, with its dominant presence in both theaters, has the biggest deficiencies. But the U.S. Central Command in Iraq (Centcom), which had overall authority, also lost records, according to reports and other documents obtained by ProPublica under the Freedom of Information Act.

In Baghdad, Centcom and the Army disagreed about which was responsible for keeping records. There was confusion about whether classified field records could be transported back to the units' headquarters in the United States. As a result, some units were instructed to erase computer hard drives when they rotated home, destroying the records that had been stored on them.

Through 2008, dozens of Army units deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan either had no field records or lacked sufficient reports for a unit history, according to Army summaries obtained by ProPublica. DeLara's outfit, the 1st Cavalry Division, was among the units lacking adequate records during his 2004 to 2005 deployment.

Recordkeeping was so poor in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2007 that 'very few Operation ENDURING FREEDOM records were saved anywhere, either for historians' use, or for the services' documentary needs for unit heritage, or for the increasing challenge with documenting Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),' according to an Army report from 2009.

Entire brigades deployed from 2003 to 2008 could not produce any field records, documents from the U.S. Army Center of Military History show.

The Pentagon was put on notice as early as 2005 that Army units weren't turning in records for storage to a central computer system created after a similar recordkeeping debacle in the 1990-91 Gulf War.

In that war, a lack of field records forced the Army to spend years and millions of dollars to reconstruct the locations of troops who may have been exposed to toxic plumes that were among the suspected causes of Gulf War Syndrome.

At the outset of the Iraq war, military commanders tried to avoid repeating that mistake, ordering units to preserve all historical records.

But the Army botched the job. Despite new guidelines issued in 2008 to safeguard records, some units still purged them. The next summer, the Washington National Guard's 81st Brigade Combat Team in Iraq was ordered to erase hard drives before leaving them for replacement troops to use, said a Guard spokesman, Capt. Keith Kosik.

Historians had complained about lax recordkeeping for years with little result.

'We were just on our knees begging for the Army to do something about it,' said Dr. Reina Pennington, a Professor at Norwich University in Vermont who chaired the Army's Historical Advisory Committee. 'It's the kind of thing that everyone nods about and agrees it's a problem but doesn't do anything about.'

Missing field records aren't necessarily an obstacle for benefit claims. The Department of Veterans Affairs also looks for medical and personnel records, which can be enough. The VA has also relaxed rules for proving post-traumatic stress to reduce the need for the detailed documentation of field reports.

'Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are unable to document the location and functions of their military units could face the same type of problems experienced by Cold War veterans exposed to radiation, Vietnam era veterans exposed to herbicides and Gulf War veterans exposed to various environmental hazards,' Murray said in a statement.

Former Secretary of the Army Peter Geren told ProPublica that he was never told about the extent of the problem of missing war records. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Already, thousands of veterans have reported respiratory problems and other health effects after exposure to toxic fumes from huge burn pits that were commonly used to dispose of garbage in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A Desperate Search for Records

The Army is required to produce records of its actions in war. Today, most units keep them on computers, and a 4,000-soldier brigade can churn out impressive volumes — roughly 500 gigabytes in a yearlong tour, or the digital equivalent of 445 books, each 200 pages long.

Field records include reports about fighting, casualties, intelligence activities, prisoners, battle damage and more, complete with pictures and maps. They do not include personnel or medical records, which are kept separately, or 'sigact' reports — short daily dispatches on significant activities, some of which were provided to news organizations by WikiLeaks in 2010.

By mid-2007, amid alarms from historians that combat units weren't turning in records after their deployments, the Army launched an effort to collect and inventory what it could find.

Army historians were dispatched on a base-by-base search worldwide. A summary of their findings shows that at least 15 brigades serving in the Iraq war at various times from 2003 to 2008 had no records on hand. The same was true for at least five brigades deployed to Afghanistan.

Records were so scarce for another 62 units that served in Iraq and 10 in Afghanistan that they were written up as 'some records, but not enough to write an adequate Army history.' This group included most of the units deployed during the first four years of the Afghanistan war.

The outreach effort by the Army was highly unusual. 'We were sending people to where they were being demobilized,' said Robert J. Dalessandro, executive director at the Army's Center of Military History. 'We even said ... 'Look we'll come to you' — that's how desperate we got.'

As word of missing records circulated, the Joint Chiefs of Staff became worried enough to order a top-level delegation of records managers from each service branch to Baghdad in April 2010 for an inspection that included recordkeeping by U.S. Central Command.

Centcom coordinated action among service branches in the theater. Among other things, Centcom's records included Pentagon orders, joint-service actions, fratricide investigations and intelligence reviews, with some records from Army units occasionally captured in the mix.

After five days, the team concluded that the 'volume, location, size and format of USF-1 records was unknown,' referring to the acronym for combined Iraq forces. The team's report to the chiefs cited 'large gaps in records collections ... the failure to capture significant operational and historical' materials and a 'poorly managed' effort to preserve records that were on hand.

In a separate, more detailed memo, two of the team's members from the National Archives and Records Administration went further.

'With the exception of the Army Corps of Engineers, none of the offices visited have responsibly managed their records,' they wrote. 'Staff reported knowledge of only the recently created and filed records and knew little of the records created prior to their deployments, including email. ... It is unclear the extent to which records exist prior to 2006.'

Part of the problem was disagreement and lack of coordination about who was responsible for certain records, including investigations into casualties and accidents, according to Michael Carlson, one of the two archivists.

'The Army would say it's Centcom's responsibility to capture after-action reports because it's a Centcom-led operation. Centcom would say it's an Army responsibility because they created their own records,' Carlson said in an interview. 'So there's finger-pointing ... and thus records are lost.'

Nearly a year after the U.S. pullout from Iraq, Centcom said it still is trying to index 47 terabytes of records for storage, or some 54 million pages of documents. It's not clear if those include anything recovered after a 2008 computer crash the Baghdad team termed 'catastrophic.'

If you learn that your records have been lost there is a way to reconstruct them through alternate sources of military service data.

Reconstruction of Lost Records

If veterans learn that their records may have been lost in the fire, they may send photocopies of any documents they possess -- especially separation documents -- to the NPRC. The address is National Personnel Records Center, Military Personnel Records, 9700 Page Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63132-5100. The NPRC will add those documents to the computerized index and file them permanently.

In 1973 there was a fire where military records are stored. If you were in the Army before 1960, there's 4 in 5 chance that your records were destroyed. If you were in the Air Force before 1964 and your name comes after Hubbard, James E., there's a 3 in 4 chance your records are gone. 1973 fire is the web page at the National Archives that gives you the details.

If your service records were destroyed the Archives will try to provide proof of service based on other types of military records. They're going to need the following information so you might as well include it on your first application:

• Place of discharge
• Last unit of assignment
• Place of entry into the service, if known.

All requests must be signed and dated by the veteran or next-of-kin.

If you are the next of kin of a deceased veteran, you must provide proof of death of the veteran such as a copy of death certificate, letter from funeral home, or published obituary.

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Requesting your Documents

You can request your documents either on-line or by mail. You can download the paper application here.

The online application, eVetRecs, will only work with Internet Explorer. Visit this page, click 'Launch the eVetRecs system to start your request Online' and answer the questions. When you're done, print, sign and either fax or mail the signature page to the address listed on the request form.

If you do not require an official copy of the DD-214 and the Veteran is/was enrolled with the VA health care system, you might be able to contact their local VA hospital and ask them for a copy of the form.

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I need my records today!

If time is of a serious issue an organization that has provided reliable service to Veterans and their families is the Aardvark Research Group. This is not a free service but the turnaround time is much shorter. ARG is located near the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. They will provide certified copies of original DD214's, usually within a day or so, for $89. ARG has an 'A' rating with the Better Business Bureau and have been providing this expedited option to veterans since 2007.

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Records can be ordered online through their website www.aardvarkresearchgroup.com.