This category includes some of the most important documents on the Holocausst such as instructions and orders, official correspondence, speeches, press clippings, reports. In other words, here you will find a variety of written sources from the Holocaust period that are not personal documents (diaries, personal letters, etc.). The official sources expose the Nazi ideology, the workings of the Nazi regime, and the nature of the apparatus of persecution and murder, as well as the Jews' activity and the responses of the Jewish leadership and organizations.

Despite the Nazis' attempt to keep the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" a secret and to destroy all evidence of the subject, many official Nazi sources documenting their crimes have been preserved. Here, for example, you can find speeches by Nazi leaders and execution orders such as the Kommissarbefehl ("Commissar Order").

Some of the Jewish sources survived almost by chance and were not actually written for posterity. But others can definitely be viewed as Jewish documentation and memorialization attempts during the Holocaust. The Jewish sources include official reports from the ghettos, as well as underground sources such as the well-known leaflet from the Vilna ghetto calling on Jewish youth to defend themselves.