Documentation from the Israel Police unit for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes

Documentation from the Israel Police unit for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes
 
 The Israel Police Department for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes was established following the enactment of the "Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law" in 1950.
 
 At its inception, the Department concentrated on Jews who were being investigated on suspicion of collaboration with the Nazis. However, the area was expanded, and the Department gathered testimonies regarding the crimes of the Nazis and their collaborators throughout Europe, testimonies which aided in investigative proceedings and trials conducted against the criminals in various countries. In many cases, the Department received applications from investigative bodies in various countries with a request to locate witnesses for specific investigations (the Yad Vashem Archives set aside a special subsection: TR/11.1 for investigations for German prosecution bodies) for which the Department published notices in the newspapers calling upon witnesses with knowledge of the crimes of a specific criminal, or crimes committed in a specific place, camp, or ghetto, to come forward and testify. The investigations were conducted in various centers throughout the country.
 
 The unit began to hand over investigative reports and files to Yad Vashem in 1964, and continued to transfer them continuously throughout the 1960s, 1970s and the early 1980s. In 1992, the State Archivist officially authorized the transfer of the entire body of inactive Department materials to Yad Vashem. As a result, additional files and reports were handed over to Yad Vashem until 2003. A card catalogue of people, organizations and places mentioned in the material was transferred to Yad Vashem in the early 1990s.
 
 The material in the files consists mainly of testimonies, some of them very detailed, of survivors, in various languages, and reports that were prepared by the investigators. Correspondence pertaining to the gathering of the material is also included.