Nuremberg Trials Project
Address
1563 Massachussetts Avenue
Cambridge
Massachusetts
MA 02138
United States
Phone
History
The Harvard Law School Library Nuremberg Trials Project began in 1998 with the limited goal of analyzing and presenting only the trial documents of NMT 1, the Medical Case. The goal of the Project is to present on a website the digital images of all the English language trial documents, trial transcripts, and related evidence collections in Harvard Law School’s Nuremberg Collection, which covers the initial international trial (the IMT) and twelve subsequent trials conducted by the United States at Nuremberg (NMT 1–12). The collection is freely available to people around the world.
Since 1998 the scope of the project has grown considerably with the Library undertaking the huge task of systematically digitizing as much of its collection of Nuremberg materials as possible. Currently three of the trials (NMT 1, the Medical Case, NMT 2, the Milch Case, and NMT 4, the Pohl Case), along with much of the evidence collections associated with those trials, have been completed and are available on the website. A fourth trial (NMT 3, the Justice Case) is nearly completed (as of December 2015), and work has begun on a fifth case (NMT 7, the Hostage Case). Work on the evidence collection most relevant for Case 3 is also in progress.
Mandates/Sources of Authority
The project is meant to serve multiple purposes and audiences: a reference resource for contemporary war crimes and human rights prosecutions; a research collection for legal academics and historians in the field; and a resource for students and members of the public interested in war crimes issues and the history of World War II. Beyond that, the project aims to produce a permanent and universally available record of the trials and the events described in the documents, which would otherwise erode as the original paper records deteriorate.
Records Management and Collecting Policies
To preserve the contents of these documents -- which are now too fragile to be handled -- and to provide expanded access to this material, the Library has undertaken a multi-stage digitization project, originally conceived in the late 1990s and implemented in stages since then. The Nuremberg Trials Project is an open-access initiative to create, present and make accessible digitized images of the Library's Nuremberg documents, document descriptions, associated transcripts in both full-text and image formats and general information about the trials.
The documents include transcripts recording the full protocol of courtroom activity over the course of each trial, indictments, arraignments, opening and closing statements, trial briefs, the documents submitted into evidence by both prosecution and defense, as well as the much larger set of source documents from which the trial exhibits were selected for use by lawyers.
Conditions of Access
The Harvard Law School Library's Nuremberg Trials Project is an open-access initiative to create and present digitized images or full-text versions of the Library's Nuremberg documents, descriptions of each document, and general information about the trials.
The Project currently provides access to most of the materials for five of the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals, NMT 1 (U.S.A. v. Karl Brandt et al.), NMT 2 (U.S.A. v. Erhard Milch), NMT3 (U.S.A. v. Josef Altstoetter et al.), NMT 4 (U.S.A. v. Pohl et al.), and NMT7 (U.S.A. v. Wilhelm List et al.).
You can search for material and view it in a variety of ways. For example, you can search for a specific document or a group of documents, review the document analysis information for those documents and then inspect the associated document images. Or you can begin with the transcript and use it as a roadmap to the document collection, linking out to the documents cited in context or search the full text via keyword.