The Yad Vashem Archive includes a large and comprehensive collection of documentation of various types that has been collected over the course of many years. Today, after more than 70 years since the establishment of the archive, the Yad Vashem Archive has the largest collection in the world of material regarding the Holocaust, containing over 210 million pages of documentation. The collection includes over 131,000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors, over 500,000 photos, and approximately 4.8 million names of Holocaust victims that have been documented and preserved in the Yad Vashem "Hall of Names".
Yad Vashem adds millions of pages of new documentation to its collection every year. The material is collected in its original form or obtained as copies from public and private collections in Israel and throughout the world.
The material encompasses the many aspects of the Holocaust story and is unique in its vast documentation of the life and fate of the Jews who were the victims of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the material also includes information regarding the persecutions, the perpetrators, the collaborators and the murder process, as well as information about those who rescued Jews and those who were stand-byers. The material covers a broad time span: mostly from the years of the persecution that preceded the war, and the war period itself - from the early 1930s and until 1945 - but much of the material regards the life of the Jews before the war and the fate of the survivors after the war. The material also deals with the ramifications of the Holocaust as seen until the present time.
The Archive includes: documentation from Jewish institutions and other official institutions; original Nazi documentation; documentation from the central historical commissions for the investigation of Nazi war crimes; legal documentation that was prepared for the trials of Nazi criminals, which was received from the institutions that dealt with the investigations or received from the courts of law after the trials, including the Nuremberg Trials in Germany and the Eichmann Trial in Israel, among others.
An important part of the documentation was received from private sources, and it includes letters, personal documents, and so forth. The Archive also has several personal collections of people who held central positions in organizations or were involved in events that happened during the Holocaust period, or who were active in the assembling of information or in research regarding the Holocaust.
Yad Vashem hopes to publish all of this documentation on its website without any restrictions (legal or technical) regarding its display. The Yad Vashem website currently includes the Photo Archive, the Shoah Names Database, millions of pages of testimony from the Documents Archive, the Righteous Among the Nations Database, the Yad Vashem Library Online Catalogue, and the Online Film Database.
