Day 1 International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg (Set A)

The United States Army Signal Corps produced two sets of verbatim audio recordings of the Nuremberg Trials outside of the courtroom in a studio. Set A (archived at the International Court of Justice in the Hague) consists of 1,942 double-sided black disc gramophone records with a cellulose trinitrate lacquer surface and aluminum core made by the Presto Recording Corporation. Set B (archived at the US National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC) consists of cardboard and aluminum gramophone discs. The two sets are not exact copies and generally stagger against each other, but sometimes have the same start or stop time corresponding to the beginning or end of a court session. The digitized and restored files made from Set A (ICJ) are much better quality than the files from Set B (NARA) which contain occasional audio distortion, especially at the beginning of a file, and skipping throughout. Technical note: Issues with the four tracks on Disc 5005A appear to be the result of a technical issue at the time of recording.