Nuremberg trial records made available online after painstaking 25-year project

Original article by Kate Connolly in Berlin

A fully digitised collection of the records of the Nuremberg trials is being launched online to mark the 80th anniversary of the start of the groundbreaking legal effort to bring Nazi leaders to justice.

Open access to every official document from the trial, held by the Harvard law school library, will be available to all researchers, whether amateur or professional, for the first time from Thursday after a 25-year endeavour by a 30-strong team of historians, metadata curators and librarians.

It began in 1998 with the removal of staples and paperclips from the delicate documents so they could be scanned. Paul Deschner, who led Harvard’s Nuremberg trials project, said that from the start the aim had been to digitise everything held on the court proceedings in the library’s collection, which had until then been kept in boxes and rarely seen. The goal was twofold: “to preserve these documents, which were starting to literally disintegrate as soon as they were touched, because they were … on 1940s-era acid-based mimeographed paper, and simply couldn’t withstand being handled, and to make them accessible in the dawn of the internet era”.

The library’s collection contains more than 750,000 pages of transcripts, briefs and evidence exhibits from across the total of 13 cases, which between 1945 and 1949 were brought against Nazi military and political leaders held responsible for atrocities against humanity, in particular the Holocaust, and revolutionised international human rights law. In the first and main proceedings, 19 of the most influential Nazis including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer were tried. In 12 subsequent trials, almost 200 were put on trial. In all, only three were found not guilty. Twelve received death sentences and others life sentences or shorter.

Included in the trove are transcripts detailing verbatim the full activity of the courtroom over the entire course of every trial as well as source documents drawn on by lawyers, and items of evidence submitted by both prosecution and defence teams.

Deschner said ordinary users would now be able to discover in a variety of ways, such as using the transcript as a roadmap into the collection, or by keyword, a far wider range of information than previously available. The documents – in some the horror is explicit, while in others it is conveyed more euphemistically in bureaucratese – provide a detailed account of how the Nazis first hatched their plans for the Holocaust and then developed them. They “give a clear picture of how comparatively innocuous things might have looked in the early 30s compared to just a few years later”, Deschner said.

“It has enormous utility for people who have eyes to see, ears to hear … in the context of every period of time, including our own, it could make people aware to be on the lookout for the dynamics as they are portrayed in these archives.”

In the first and main proceedings, 19 of the most influential Nazis including Hermann Göring (pictured in about December 1945) were tried.

Inquiries so far have come from everyone from historians and film producers to people searching for information on relatives who had participated in the trial, whether as witnesses, as part of the legal teams or as a defendant.

At a time when academic freedom is generally perceived to be under threat and, in the US in particular, universities are being challenged over their traditional role as places for fostering truth, the project had taken on even more significance, Deschner said.

“Of course if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Holocaust denier, the sky’s the limit in terms of what you can come up with to argue that it didn’t happen. As people’s access to the world is so much influenced by what’s digitally accessible, and as we’re seeing the undermining of whatever might have previously passed as authentic, it’s absolutely essential that we are offering the user buttressing evidence that proves the authenticity of what they’re looking at.”

He cited the extensive documentary trail behind each trial exhibit. “There’s a government document, of which a photostat is made, which is transcribed into German, of which a typescript version is made, which is translated into English, of which there is a one-page summary.”

As for the court activity, the linguistic side offered an entirely under-researched field of its own, Deschner said. “You had the first extensive introduction of simultaneous translators, to cope with the four languages being used, then the stenographer taking down the verbatim verbiage from the translator that she’s hearing in her headset, and then someone typing it up. There were multiple layers of interpretation going on and I think very little research has been done on that.”

Amanda Watson, of Harvard law school’s library and information services, said the robust preservation of the documents as digital surrogates was not enough on its own: the knowledge had to be shared. “This collection stands as an answer to one of history’s more critical questions,” she said in a statement. “How can law rise to meet moments of international crisis? Today we ensure that answer is not locked away but available to all. When we make justice visible, we make it possible.”