Select Pages
The Main Commission archive provided a total of 3,500 running meters of archival materials.
The stored documentation includes both files drafted by the offices and security authorities of the Third Reich, including the Main Reich Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) and the Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei), as well as foreign institutions, including American Military Tribunals in Nuremberg . They are supplemented by the documentation received by the Main Commission as a result of multilateral cooperation with foreign institutions and Polish state archives, as well as materials donated by private persons.
The resource taken over from the Main Commission includes many priceless documents, such as the report by Jürgen Stroop regarding the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, the diary of General Governor Hans Frank or the diary of Johann Paul Kremer, an SS doctor at the Auschwitz-Birkenau German concentration camp. The collected archives were used, among others in the trial pending after the end of World War II before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg and in criminal proceedings before the Polish Supreme National Tribunal (including trials of Rudolf Höss and the personnel of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp). The original files from German concentration camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Dachau, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Mittelbau, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen) and the documentation concerning Poles sent to forced labour in the territory of the Third Reich - including transport lists of labour offices in Warsaw and Cracow– are also of unique historical value. 
In addition to German-language documents, the resource also includes files of criminal proceedings initiated on the basis of the decree of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) of 31 August 1944 on the sentence for fascist-Nazi criminals guilty of murders and ill-treatment of the civilian population and prisoners of war, and traitors of the Polish nation, as well as prosecutor's files of cases discontinued and suspended on the basis of the decree. Particularly noteworthy in this group of archives are procedural documents pertaining to Erich Koch, a former Gauleiter of East Prussia and persons convicted of preaching the truth about the Katyn Massacre. The collection also includes files about Polish forced labourers and persons arrested by the German Secret State Police (Gestapo) from the Ciechanów/Płock region.
During its existence, the Main Commission collected unique documentation , enabling the reconstruction of the fate of victims of German repression.