The aim of the project is to publish selected diaries written by Polish participants in competitions organised between 1945 and 1948 by the West Institute (Instytut Zachodni) in Poznań on the subject of the German occupation of Poland during the Second World War. The diaries will be made available in an open-access online archive and published in both digital and printed source editions in German and Polish. The collection from Poznań contains accounts written shortly after the end of the war, describing the hardships of occupation in the everyday lives of the Polish population in Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) and Central Poland.

The entire collection of memoirs submitted up to 1948 is of great value for research into the evolving culture of remembrance of the Second World War and the memory of the horrors of occupation in the former Eastern Bloc. In contrast to memoirs from later decades of communist Poland, the style and content of the Poznań memoirs were not shaped by post-war communist propaganda or altered by the passage of time.

The project draws on the latest findings of Polish, German and Anglo-Saxon historiography on the German occupation of Poland and other European countries.