The National Personnel Records Center fire of 1973, also referred to as the 1973 National Archives fire was a fire that occurred at the Military Personnel Records Center (MPRC - part of the National Personnel Records Center) in Overland, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, on July 12, 1973, striking a severe blow to the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States. MPRC, the custodian of military service records, lost approximately 16–18 million official military personnel records as a result of the fire.
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Affected records

The losses to Federal military records collection included:

• 80% loss to records of U.S. Army personnel discharged November 1, 1912, to January 1, 1960
• 75% loss to records of U.S. Air Force personnel discharged September 25, 1947, to January 1, 1964, with names alphabetically after Hubbard, James E.
• Some U.S. Army Reserve personnel who performed their initial active duty for training in the late 1950s but who received final discharge as late as 1964.

None of the records that were destroyed in the fire had duplicate copies made, nor had they been copied to microfilm. No index of these records was made prior to the fire, and millions of records were on loan to the Veterans Administration at the time of the fire. This made it difficult to precisely determine which records were lost.

Navy and Marine Corps records

On the morning of the National Archives Fire, a very small number of U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps records were out of their normal file area being worked on as active requests by employees of the National Archives and Records Administration who maintained their offices on the 6th floor of the building. When the NPRC fire began, these Navy and Marine Corps records were caught in the section of the building which experienced the most damage in the fire.

The exact number of Navy and Marine Corps records destroyed in the fire is unknown, since such records were being removed only for a few days while information was retrieved from the record and were not normally stored in the area of the building which experienced the fire. Estimates indicate that the number of affected records was no more than two to three dozen. Such records are considered "special cases", and no accounting could be made of which records were affected, so the present policy of NPRC is to state that there were no Navy and Marine Corps records destroyed in the fire and to treat these records as records that had been lost in ordinary circumstances.

The destroyed sixth floor of the NPRC also housed a security vault which contained high profile and notable records of U.S. Navy and Marine Corps personnel. Known as the "Sixth Floor Vault", confirmed destroyed records included the Navy file of Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou as well as the record of Adolf Hitler's nephew William Patrick Hitler. The sixth floor security vault also held all the records of current NPRC employees who had their own Navy and Marine Corps records retired at the agency.

Damage and reconstruction

The 1973 fire destroyed the entire 6th floor of the National Personnel Records Center and greatly affected the 5th floor with water damage. As part of the reconstruction, the entire 6th floor was removed due to the extensive damage, resulting in the current structure now consisting of 5 floors. The rehabilitated building has firewalls to divide the large, open records storage areas. Smoke detection and sprinkler systems have also been added to prevent a repetition of the 1973 fire. Signs of the fire can still be seen today. A massive effort to restore destroyed service records began in 1974. In most cases where a military record has been presumed destroyed, NPRC is able to reconstruct basic service information, such as military date of entry, date of discharge, character of service, and final rank.