Abstract
In August 1944 the Central Jewish Historical Commission was established in newly liberated Lublin. This commission, headed by Philip Friedman and staffed mainly by survivors who had had no historical training before the war, succeeded in collecting over 3,000 survivor testimonies and thousands of pages of Nazi documents, along with diaries, memoirs, photographs, etc. In October 1947 the Polish authorities disbanded the Commission, and its initiative was continued by the Central Historical Commission, established in Munich in November 1945. The latter also amassed many testimonies and documents which, after the Commission was closed in January 1949, were shipped to Yad Vashem. Over the years, study of the Holocaust passed to professional historians in Israel, Poland, Germany, and elsewhere, who denigrated the non-academic methods of the Commissions and viewed the accounts of the former victims with suspicion; the founders of both Commissions did not educate a second generation of scholars who could have continued their approach and methodology. It is due to these factors that the huge amount of materials collected by the Commissions have been neglected by scholars. Only in the 1990s did historians begin to write scholarly accounts of the Holocaust that considered both perpetrator and victim perspectives and acknowledged the value of the work that had been done by the two Commissions.