The War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg
Nuremberg Trials Project: A Digital Document Collection
The Harvard Law School Library has over a million pages of trial transcripts, briefs, document books, evidence files, and other documents relating to the trial of military and political leaders of the Third Reich before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and to the trials of other accused war criminals before the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunal (NMT). Over the years, the collection has received regular use by scholars and others interested in these significant historical events. The documents are of great value to lawyers and to scholars in the areas of history, religion, ethics, genocide and war crimes, and are of particular interest to officials and students of current international criminal tribunals. However, many of these documents are now in such fragile condition that the collection has been closed to outside researchers. To preserve their contents, to continue to make these documents accessible to scholars, indeed to provide expanded access to this material, the Library has begun a digital project to preserve the texts and make them available on the Web.
The first stage of the project deals with the documents of Case No. 1 before the NMT, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA vs. KARL BRANDT, et al., (The Medical Case Trial, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10. Nuremberg, October 1946 - April 1949. Washington D.C.: U.S. G.P.O, 1949-1953. National Archives Record Group 238, M887). The Medical Case (also known as the Doctors' Trial) was held in 1946-47 and involved 23 defendants accused of organizing and participating in war crimes and crimes against humanity through medical experiments and medical procedures inflicted on prisoners and civilians.
The briefs and evidentiary documents in our possession (mostly English, but including some German language) are being digitized as images, which will result in approximately 13,000 images. The evidentiary documents include affidavits, letters, administrative and military records, official Nazi publications, and photographs. Digitized images of the copies (mostly photostats) of the original documents convey the look of the original, contain handwritten changes and notes, and provide evidence of the events described.
In addition to the documents, the English language transcript of the trial, that is, the day-to-day record of the trial proceedings, is being converted into searchable electronic text. The full conversion and proofreading of the transcript is proceeding and part of the transcript is now available on the Web site.
The Web page search engine provides access to the documents from a variety of access points, including title, stage of trial, document number, and proper name.
The goal of the project is to create and mount images or full-text versions of all the documents in the Library's collection on the Internet. If the pilot project is successful and additional money can be located,the conversion of documents from subsequent trials will follow.
Contact Information: nuremb@law.harvard.edu