Harvard Law Today: “Beginning today, the Harvard Law School Library is making available online the first complete, fully searchable, digitized collection of official evidentiary documents and trial transcripts in English from all 13 Nuremberg Trials, at https://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/.  On the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the first trial on November 20, 1945, researchers, scholars, and learners around the globe for the first time have open access to a fully searchable digital archive. Led by the library’s Nuremberg Trials Project, the effort to digitize, transcribe, and catalog official documents from the library’s Nuremberg Trials collection has spanned more than a quarter century. “Eighty years after the Nuremberg Trials began, the efforts by prosecutors, judges, and others to seek a measure of justice in the aftermath of monstrous atrocities stand as a landmark moment in the history of law and society,” said John C.P. Goldberg, the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. “The decades-long endeavor to digitize and, for the first time, to make these indispensable records available to the world is a testament to the power of universities to foster the search for truth by preserving and sharing knowledge.” Considered by many to be the most significant series of criminal hearings in modern history, the Nuremberg Trials were initiated to prosecute Nazi war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against Jews and members of other minority groups. Six million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust and millions more victims perished. The proceedings helped establish a permanent historical record of Holocaust atrocities and further efforts to establish universal wartime conduct standards. The library’s collection, the most complete set of Nuremberg Trials documents outside that of the United States National Archives, offers more than 750,000 pages of transcripts, briefs, and evidence exhibits from the 13 cases brought against Nazi military and political leaders from 1945 to 1949. The library received the bulk of its collection in 1949 when the trials concluded and has added documents donated over the years by tribunal participants.

These voluminous primary materials offer a trove of insights into the day-to-day operations of Nazi Germany and its pursuit of war and reprisal,” said Jonathan Zittrain ’95, vice dean for Library and Information Resources and George Bemis Professor of International Law. “Researchers and the general public can now go beyond summaries to see just what facts and testimonies were collected, how they were challenged, and how differing accounts were or weren’t reconciled to conduct and resolve an unprecedented set of trials.”