Harold Burson collection
Extent and Medium
folders
4
Creator(s)
- Harold Burson
Biographical History
Harold Burson, a native of Memphis, Tennessee (born 1921), graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1940, and worked initially as a report for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and then went to work as director of publicity for the H.K. Ferguson Company in New York. Drafted in 1943, he served in the United States Army as a combat engineer during World War II, seeing service in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Following the war, he was assigned to work as a news correspondent for the American Forces Network, covering the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-1946. In that capacity, he wrote scripts summarizing daily developments at the trial, which would then be used in the evening broadcast of AFN. After returning from Europe in 1946, he started his own public relations firm in New York, but eventually became best known as the co-founder and CEO of the public relations firm of Burson-Marsteller, which was established in New York in 1953.
Archival History
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Acquisition
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Harold Burson
Harold Burson donated the Harold Burson collection to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2013.
Scope and Content
Collection consists of 44 typescript and mimeograph texts of the radio scripts authored by Burson, summarizing each day's proceedings of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which were broadcast each evening over the American Forces Network (AFN). According to Burson, most scripts were written in the evening following the day’s trial proceedings and in preparation for a 9:00 p.m. broadcast over AFN. The scripts cover the period between 19 November 1945 and 29 March 1946, and while typically consisting of brief summaries of the day's events in the courtroom, they sometimes also included interviews with figures ranging from courtroom security officers and a prison psychiatrist, to journalist Howard K. Smith or Justice Robert H. Jackson.
System of Arrangement
Scripts are arranged in chronological order, by date of broadcast.
Subjects
- United States--Armed Forces--Journalists.
- Nuremberg Trial of Major German War Criminals, Nuremberg, Germany, 1945-1946.
- Radio broadcasting
Genre
- Document