Sampling Military Personnel Records: Data Quality and Theoretical Uses of Organizational Process-generated Data

The paper discusses methodological issues relating to the use of historical sources by social scientists. It is focussed on the particularities of sampling historical mass data and an assessment of the achievable data quality in respect to the theoretical uses of such material. Conclusions are drawn from a project in which a number of samples have been created that contain biographical data on German males who served in the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS during the Second World War. This dataset combines the four most important collections of individual-related files for this target group: the army's personnel files and personnel registers, as well as Red Cross information on prisoners of war and missing soldiers. The data contains a large number of variables covering a soldier's life from birth to the end of his military service and is available at the German Federal Archives.