Anne Frank

The Jewish girl kept her diary during the German occupation of the Netherlands from 12 June 1942 to 1 August 1944. Exactly three days after the final entry, the entire family was arrested. Anne herself died a year later in a concentration camp of typhus, but her diary was found and handed over to her father, Otto Frank. The girl's notes were first published in 1947. Today the Diary has been translated into 60 languages, and its total circulation over the years exceeds 25 million copies. The original of the Diary is kept at the Amsterdam State Institute of War Documentation.

Franz Halder

One of the few diaries written by a senior military commander and preserved from that era in such a large volume—three volumes of material. Colonel General Halder's War Diary contains almost daily entries from 14 August 1939 to 24 September 1942. Halder describes the Polish campaign, the beginning of the Eastern campaign, and the advance into Russia up to the offensive on Stalingrad. To this day, the diaries are regarded as some of the most valuable source material on the actions of the Wehrmacht.

Tanya Savicheva

In Soviet times every first-grader knew the famous notebook of the Leningrad blockade survivor Tanya. The first entry, about her elder sister—“Zhenya died at 12 in the morning”—is dated 28 December 1941. The last, undated entry reads: “Only Tanya is left” (approximately May 1942). The notebook contains only nine such entries, yet even that was enough for it to be presented at the Nuremberg Trials as evidence of the crimes committed by the Nazis. The diary is kept at the Museum of the History of Leningrad.

Fedor von Bock

The diary of Field Marshal von Bock describes events from 1941 to 1945. He commanded Army Groups “B”, “Centre” and “South”. The most interesting passages are von Bock's descriptions written while he commanded the offensive on Moscow in 1941. He records his impressions of the Soviet army and civilians and mentions the tactical miscalculations of the German army. Today the diary is regarded as one of the most important military testimonies.

Etty Hillesum

The 27-year-old Jewish woman from Deventer in the Netherlands began keeping her diary in May 1941. In 1942 Etty volunteered to work in the Westerbork camp as a social worker representing Amsterdam's Jewish community, so her personal reflections in the diary are interwoven with descriptions of camp life. For unclear reasons the entries stop in October of that year. In 1943 Etty and her family were arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where she died. Etty's diaries, as well as her letters, were published much later—in 1981.

Ernst Jünger

The famous German writer and thinker travelled a path from being an apologist for war as the highest form of life and for a special German path—views that permeate his book In Storms of Steel, based on his front-line diaries of 1914–1918—to recognizing the civilizational dead end in which his country found itself at the beginning of the Second World War. In his diaries of 1941–1945, which formed the basis of the book Radiations, he appears as an officer-intellectual made heavy by his uniform, ashamed of the yellow stars on Jewish clothing, of the atrocities of the Gestapo, of Hitler, and of himself.

Boris Vildé

Boris Vildé, a native of St Petersburg, was a Russian émigré who moved to Europe with his family at the age of twenty. During the Second World War he had to defend not his own homeland but France. There he became one of the founders of the famous Resistance movement, for which he was imprisoned. It was as a prisoner that he kept his diary from June 1941 to January 1942. While awaiting a death sentence, Vildé wrote especially often about death. The diary later became very popular in France, and Vildé himself was posthumously awarded the status of a national hero.

Vladimir Gelfand

When he went to the front, the 19-year-old young man, a native of eastern Ukraine, was not prepared to devote himself completely to the war. He wanted to become a writer or, at the very least, simply to record his thoughts, and so he began a personal diary even though this was practically forbidden in the Soviet army. The diary describes events from 1941 to 1946. Curiously, German publishers were the first to publish a book containing Gelfand's diary entries.

Wolfgang Buff

The diary entries of a German non-commissioned officer who fought near Leningrad are, in fact, letters. For fourteen months Buff regularly wrote them to his family in Germany, while preserving the format of a personal diary. He writes about the Russian cold and describes starving Russian prisoners of war. The diary survived to the present day thanks to Wolfgang's brother, who preserved the manuscripts. They were published in 2000 under the title Under Leningrad. War Diary.

Valya Safronova

The personal notes of Valya Safronova, a member of a Bryansk partisan detachment, are a recent discovery. In the Motorist's Notebook, the 24-year-old woman described her time in the forests with the partisans for a little more than two months—from 7 October to 17 December 1942—and recorded the most interesting conversations and thoughts. For more on Valya Safronova's diary, see the article “For the Truth About the War” in Ogonyok, No. 17.

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