Slovak–Hungarian Cooperation in Processing Data on WWI Personnel Losses

The processing of data on WWI personnel losses has reached another milestone in the framework of a project currently under way in the MoD Institute and Museum of Military History (MoD IMMH) with the title “The Hungarian soldiers’ sacrifice in World War I". The digitalization of 239 Hungarian-related WWI necrologies deposited in the Bratislava Military History Archive (MHA) has been completed. These necrologies – just like the ones kept in the Budapest War History Archives and the Austrian War Archives in Vienna – provide one of the foundations for that database which, according to plans, will have been uploaded to the web by November 2018, and will make accessible, in a searchable format, all data on soldiers of Hungarian nationality who were wounded, went missing, became ill or were taken prisoners of war during the First World War.

These Hungarian-related necrologies are kept in the Bratislava Military History Archive because in the case of several army units recruited from the Transdanubia and Upper Hungary, Bratislava – as the seat of the one-time Imperial and Royal 5th Corps and Army Headquarters and the Royal Hungarian 4th military district – was the seat of the higher command with the relevant scope of authority as well, so the necrologies that these army units kept in the battlefield were filed in Bratislava. Of course, there were also different medical institutions (e.g. the imperial and royal garrison hospital in Kosice) functioning in the district, whose documents and necrologies were eventually deposited in the Bratislava Military History Archive, too.

Similarly to the currently ongoing data processing in the MoD IMMH, Czechoslovakia also collected data of WWI losses in the 1920s, for example about the soldiers killed in action in infantry regiments recruited from Upper Hungary. The necrologies compiled during the gathering of data back then have also been digitalized in the interest of collecting the largest amount of information possible.

At the 23 May meeting, MoD IMMH Commandant Col. Dr. Vilmos Kovács received the three-member Slovak delegation headed by Dr. Peter Kralčák, Director of the Slovak Military History Archive, and in accordance with the agreement, handed over the digitalized data file on a data medium to the Slovak partner.

Photo: Péter Szikits