Abstract
Immediately after the war, Jewish historical commissions throughout liberated Europe collected eyewitness accounts and other primary sources on the Jewish catastrophe and made the first attempts at historical research. Analyzes the history of those historical commissions and documentation centers that were the largest and the most significant - in France and Poland, and in the DP camps. The commissions consisted of Holocaust survivors, mainly amateur historians. They saw the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust as their moral obligation. For some, their main goal was assembling documentary evidence for historical scholarship, while others aimed at using the data toward political ends. Some of the commissions developed into institutions, such as the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Despite skepticism on the part of Yad Vashem toward the "amateurish" work done by the commissions, the latter influenced Israeli Holocaust research, which has focused on the internal Jewish perspective of the Nazi onslaught rather than on the perpetrators.