On February 29, this year, the resources of Institute of National Remembrance were enriched by new acquisitions, transferred from the archives of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Obtaining of this collection of documents was made possible due to an updated cooperation agreement, signed between the two institutions on August 22, 2011.

The collection consists of reports and memoirs of the Polish and Jewish nationals living in German-occupied Polish territories. These important sources, which can be categorized as so-called "individual diaries", reveal the fates of Polish citizens, including many aspects of their everyday life in the occupied territories. They also bring closer the picture of living conditions in the ghettos, including Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, as well as in smaller towns throughout the country. Much of the material consists of reminiscences of those who suffered imprisonment in German-created death camps, concentration camps or forced labor camps. Such documentation may therefore constitute an abundant source of information for historians doing research on the organization and activity in such camps as: Auschwitz, Dachau, Stutthof, Treblinka, and Belzec.

Another subject on which the documents touch upon are the cases of trials of Nazi war criminals. These feature, among others, the documentation concerning the investigation against the Auschwitz camp command, the materials on the pseudo-medical experiments conducted by Josef Menegele or materials from the investigations conducted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

A certain group of materials are the copies of documents acquired by the Museum of the Holocaust from the state archives in Vilnius, Grodno and Lvov. These include documents from local German administration, files created by the occupying authorities, military reports and articles relating to the current situation of the territories occupied by German troops.

The documentation obtained from the Holocaust Memorial Museum corresponds to the previous materials gotten from the Institute of Martyrs' and Heroes’ of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The collections which were shared by Yad Vashem with IPN also have a relational and reminiscent character, and their dominant theme is the destruction of the Jewish nation during World War II.