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"e Nuremberg Trials Project at Harvard Law School: Making History
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THE NUREMBERG TRIALS PROJECT AT HARVARD LAW SCHOOL:
MAKING HISTORY ACCESSIBLE TO ALL
This is the raw material of history in wonderful profusion.
—Telford Taylor
The thirteen Nuremberg trials together constitute one of the most significant events in the
history of the twentieth century. Taking place during the years immediately after the
Second World War, the trials set the stage for the development of the modern law of
warfare, codified protocols in the fields of human rights and medical experimentation,
and, perhaps most importantly, created an indelible, if at times incomplete, record of the
crimes of Nazi Germany. Quincy Wright gave an excellent summation of the trials’
raison d’être in the Harvard Law Review:
The Nuremberg trials were designed (1) to carry out the Allied war aim of
punishing the major war criminals without denying due process of law to
the accused, (2) to influence opinion in Germany and elsewhere in order to
deter future aggressions and atrocities, (3) to contribute to the historical
record and to public enlightenment by making available authentic
evidence of the process of development and methods of the “Nazi
Conspiracy,” and (4) to contribute to the development of international law,
especially on the subjects of war, aggression, and atrocities.
1
Former Harvard Law School librarian Terry Martin, an early organizer of the Nuremberg
Trials Project, summed up why these records continue to matter: “The documentation
from such tribunals helps establish a permanent record of the truth that makes it more
difficult for revisionists to try to alter history.”
2
The impending seventy-fifth anniversary
of the trials’ commencement offers a welcome opportunity to look at the current status of
the documentary evidence.
This paper addresses two separate but related topics. First, what is the fate of the
documents left behind in 1949, when the trials finished. Where are these documents now?
How accessible are they? Second, this article describes the history, development, and
current status of the Nuremberg Trials Project at Harvard Law School.
The Trials’ Printed Record
Thousands of books and journal articles have been written about World War II over the
past seven decades. Of these, an enormous number of books and scholarly articles have
focused on the trials themselves, including memoirs by participants (prosecutors,
defendants, judges, psychologists, and others), historical and legal analyses, and
discussions of the trials’ impact on international law and historiography. Authors of these
1
Wright, “Nuremberg,” 964.
2
“HLS Launches Nuremberg Trials Project.”
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Haran: Harvard Law School's Nuremberg Trials Project
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works, writing primarily in German or English, have used the trial documents as primary
sources, as evidenced by their abundant appearance in notes and bibliographies over the
past six and a half decades. Clearly lawyers, historians, and scholars have found the
records of the Nuremberg trials useful. A careful review of the literature, however,
reveals a surprising dearth of writing about the trial documents themselves. After being
featured in press releases in 1949, this topic—the nature, quantities, locations,
accessibility, and preservation/arrangement challenges of the trial documents—has
virtually disappeared from printed discourse.
It is rare for a collection of paper weighing more than one hundred tons to nearly
disappear from the historical record.
3
This feat becomes even more remarkable on
reading Telford Taylor’s August 1949 Final Report to the Secretary of the Army on the
Nuernberg War Crimes Trials. Taylor, the chief of counsel for all twelve Nuremberg
Military Tribunal (NMT) trials (those following the International Military Tribunal of
1945–46), stated that “one of the most important problems . . . was the disposition of the
very large amount of documents . . . assembled in connection with the trials.” He went on
to list the repositories to which a complete, or nearly complete, set of records was being
donated. According to this knowledgeable source, seventeen U.S. repositories would
receive these collections, ranging from the obvious—the National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA), Library of Congress—to the less obvious, such as the
University of North Dakota.
4
Taylor’s list includes thirteen academic libraries.
Remaining sets were donated to German institutions and other European entities such as
the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
Confusingly, a press release dated two months earlier from the Office of Military
Government for Germany (OMGUS) gives a list of only twelve U.S. repositories,
including two not even mentioned in Taylor’s count.
5
Other writers give lists that include
yet other repositories. No source has a complete list, and none of the lists agree.
Together, the lists name over twenty U.S. repositories. (Appendix A provides a list of
these, with current status of records.)
Even if only a handful of the named recipients (primarily leading academic libraries such
as Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton) had received large collections of original trial
documents, one might expect such historically significant collections to have generated
some documentation of their own in professional journals read by archivists, academic
librarians, or historians. Such, however, is not the case. Searches have turned up only
four articles about these documents, two published by members of the prosecution team,
one by the head of the Document Division at Nuremberg, and one by a leading Library of
Congress archivist—all written prior to 1955.
3
Mendelsohn, Trial by Document.
4
Taylor, Final Report, 98, 99–100.
5
Public Information Office, OMGUS, “Collection Donation.”
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Chief of Counsel Telford Taylor wrote about research possibilities afforded by the trial
record before the final trial had concluded.
6
A year later, former Deputy Chief of Counsel
Robert Kempner wrote a piece in the American Political Science Review.
7
Fred
Niebergall, head of the Document Division, penned a “brief survey” of the records’
current status for the Law Library Journal.
8
And a grand total of one additional article
has appeared since 1950: Library of Congress archivist Fritz Epstein wrote about
“research opportunities in Washington, DC for the WWII period.”
9
A few articles have
appeared over the years in German-language journals as well, which are not discussed
here.
The situation is not much different with regard to books. Of the three relevant titles that
appeared by the mid-1970s, two were written by NARA archivist John Mendelsohn: his
Ph.D. thesis analyzing the four main document series used in the twelve “subsequent”
NMT trials, still considered a primary source for anyone dealing with these documents,
and his detailed finding aid to the microfilmed NARA documentary record for NMT case
9, the “Einsatzgruppen Trial.”
10
In 1976, Jacob Robinson, an international legal scholar,
and Henry Sachs, a former document analyst at Nuremberg, compiled a detailed, deeply
indexed list of 3,001 Nuremberg documents (listed by evidence file number and heavily
annotated) pertinent to the Holocaust.
11
One other useful catalogue is the 1961 Catalogue
of Nuremberg Documents from London’s Wiener Library, which not only lists
prosecution and defense documents but also references a separate list of 4,500
interrogation summaries.
12
Last but not least is an essay by the prolific Telford Taylor, “The Use of Captured
German and Related Records in the Nuernberg War Crimes Trials.”
13
The trial record has
contributed to countless works of historical and legal analysis since 1949, but since 1978
no further books or articles in English discussing the documents themselves have
emerged.
14
It is worth noting that the U.S. government published over sixty bound volumes of trial
records, evidence documents, and related materials in the years during and immediately
following the trials; these are known as the Blue, Red, and Green series. Despite the large
amount of shelf space these take up in academic libraries, they contain less than 10
6
Taylor, “Forum Juridicum.”
7
Kempner, “The Nuremberg Trials.”
8
Niebergall, “Brief Survey.”
9
Epstein, “Washington Research Opportunities.”
10
Mendelsohn, Trial by Document; Mendelsohn, War Crimes Trials.
11
Robinson and Sachs, The Holocaust.
12
Catalogue of Nuremberg Documents.
13
Taylor, “Use of Captured German and Related Records.”
14
An amusing exception to this was the flurry of news articles, mostly from 2013, on the controversy
between the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the heirs of Deputy Chief of Counsel Robert Kempner,
who had shipped eight tons of documents from Nuremberg to his home in Pennsylvania in 1949. See
Wittman and Kinney, The Devil’s Diary.
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percent of the existing trial documents.
15
An additional catalogue of Nuremberg-related
materials is the useful European War Crimes Trials: A Bibliography, prepared by Inge
Neumann and published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
16
This well-
annotated list of books and articles is unfortunately limited by its temporal coverage
(1941–50) and lack of later editions.
After all this time, some might argue that this lack of discourse on the trial documents
and their fate no longer matters, especially as few of the record sets appear to have
survived. Apart from holdings at NARA, significant sets of Nuremberg trial records can
be found at only a handful of the listed schools and institutions.
17
Given Telford Taylor’s
statement that “the most immediate problem is that those records be disposed of in such a
way that they will be available to those who need them,” one can only imagine his dismay
at how far current reality diverges from this ideal.
18
It therefore becomes a cause for
celebration—for historians, educators, and anyone interested in the historical record—
that the Harvard Law School Library has digitized its Nuremberg Trials Collection and is
in the process of making all of it freely available to anyone with a computer and Internet
access.
The Nuremberg Trials Project at Harvard Law School
Harvard is the only U.S. institution apart from the National Archives currently thought to
have a nearly complete set of trial records; since 1949 Harvard Law School (HLS) has
been the proud owner of approximately 1 million pages (between seven and twelve tons
of paper). In the 1990s, HLS librarians realized that this enormous, aging collection
would need significant attention to ensure its survival for use by future researchers.
Over the first fifty years of their existence, the trial records were stored haphazardly in
unused stairwells, filing cabinets in damp cellars, and wherever space could be found.
Some boxes sustained water damage as a result. Preservation of the collection became
ever more urgent as the fragile condition of the paper necessitated restricting public local
access at Harvard. Thus, digital preservation would instead enable digital access over the
Web.
The HLS collection includes transcripts (over 150,000 pages) of the full course of
courtroom activity during each of the trials; indictments, arraignments, opening and
closing statements, trial briefs, all documents prepared as evidence by prosecution and
15
Kempner, “The Nuremberg Trials,” 449.
16
Neumann, European War Crimes Trials.
17
Apart from the Harvard collection, significant holdings exist at the Universities of North Dakota,
Michigan, Washington, and Cincinnati; Columbia University; the Center for Research Libraries, Chicago;
and the University of Southern California (which was not named in any source). The University of Georgia
Law School has a smaller collection. See appendix A for a complete list. Many repositories have related
collections donated later by trial participants: Cornell University’s Donovan Collection and the Robert
Jackson Papers at the Library of Congress are only two examples. See appendix B for a list of these related
collections.
18
Taylor, “Forum Juridicum,” 508, emphasis added.
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defense attorneys (“case files”); plus the much larger set of source documents from which
trial exhibits were selected—the so-called evidence files, which constitute a full 60
percent of the collection. The evidence files contain not only Nazi documents captured by
Allied forces but also affidavits, interrogations, articles from newspapers, and excerpts
from Nazi law journals. Nearly 16 percent of the entire collection consists of photostatic
reproductions, and a full quarter of the collection is from trial 11, the “Ministries Trial.”
Original documents, captured during or at the end of the war, were kept at Allied-
controlled facilities across Germany; photostats made at these “document centers” were
the closest thing to the originals the prosecutors had. Originals of postwar documents
(interrogations and affidavits) were kept separately at Nuremberg, with photostats also
provided for these.
By the end of the 1990s, HLS library staff realized that the time had come to impose
access limitation on these original records; the half-century-old documents, printed on
low-quality paper to begin with, were fast becoming too brittle to be handled. The staff
decided to digitize 750,000 pages from the collection, an enormous undertaking that
would end up taking far more time and resources than anticipated. (The remaining
250,000 pages were either duplicates or German transcripts and trial documents for
which English translations existed.) As digitization progressed, the boxes holding original
files and papers would be transferred to the Harvard Depository, a gargantuan, climate-
controlled, high-density book and media storage facility located in a remote forest in
Southborough, Massachusetts, thirty miles west of the Law School.
Ambitious Goals, Scarce Funding
The project began with digitization of documents from the first NMT trial, the “Medical
Trial.” The Kenneth and Evelyn Lipper Foundation generously awarded $100,000 to the
HLS Library to get started. This donation, along with internal library funding and salaried
staff support, underwrote this pilot phase of the project. By 2003, over twenty thousand
pages had been scanned in, analyzed by the project historian, and uploaded to the Web,
allowing the website to be launched that same year. By the time this pilot phase was
completed, staff realized that getting the entire record of all thirteen trials online would
cost several million dollars. Funding failed to keep up with expectations, however, and
progress became intermittent. Then, in 2014–16, Harvard Library’s Open Your Hidden
Collections project provided a welcome infusion of $230,000, which enabled staff to
complete the digitization phase of the project. Subsequent funding from the National
Endowment for the Humanities has supported document analysis for the Einsatzgruppen
Trial.
Digitization Process
The process of digitization has been a long and winding road, beginning in 1999 and only
completed in 2016. Originally, staff used flatbed scanners and digital cameras, and
progress was slow. In 2011, an outside vendor managed to scan nineteen thousand pages
in five months. After the Open Your Hidden Collections funding arrived, the team took
advantage of the high-speed, batch-loading ImageTrac scanner already on site (leased for
5
Haran: Harvard Law School's Nuremberg Trials Project
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another project), and work sped up. Over a five-month period, the six-person team spent
two thousand hours to bring the total number of scanned pages up to nearly 750,000.
Because of the age and condition of the documents, however, scanning proceeded at only
one-fourth the rate possible with modern documents.
19
For each hour of actual scanning,
three to four hours of quality control and prep work were needed. This included removing
fasteners and replacing old folders with bar-coded acid-free ones. (The original prep
work of putting the files and documents into proper sequence took place in 1998–99 and
is not counted in these figures.) Given the amount of prep work needed, and the slower
scanning rate for old paper, the total cost came in at an acceptable $0.22 per two-sided
page.
The ImageTrac scanner performed well on old paper, but oversized and damaged
documents had to be scanned separately by Harvard Library’s Imaging Services group,
and the 157,000 photostats required manual processing using a Zeutschel scanner. The
main output of these digitization workflows was an archival master image: 300 dpi
lossless 24-bit JPEG 2000. When the scanning had been completed (and much of the
funding depleted), the much slower work of document analysis resumed.
The Collection Itself
Before the arrival of the Internet, a collection as large and unwieldy as the million-plus
pages of Harvard’s Nuremberg records presented library and archives staff with a
daunting challenge: how to arrange these papers and make them fully accessible to users?
The fact that so few of the U.S. repositories owning these records (other than NARA)
appear to have created a finding aid in the fifty years since their original distribution
speaks to this challenge.
20
Harvard Library staff decided early on that this challenge required a new tool, something
far deeper and richer than a traditional, twentieth-century finding aid. The ambitious
objective of full-text and document-level discovery mandated the use of a sophisticated
database capable of holding all data fields relevant to future users. (The database supports
the site’s graphical user interface.) Initially launched in 2003, back in the days of Web
1.0, the site was completely redesigned and relaunched in 2016. The interface features
• for each trial:
o a basic narrative
o an indictment, with specific counts
o list of trial issues (e.g., hostage taking, medical experiments)
o a detailed chronology, with dates matched to transcript pages
19
Stephen Chapman, personal communication, 2017.
20
NARA archivists compiled three finding aids between 1949 and 1966. The first one, Preliminary
Inventory 21, was digitized by Google and put online by HathiTrust. Aside from the official, published
records of the trials contained in the Blue, Red, and Green series, it remains the only known online guide to
the Nuremberg records in English. The two later NARA finding aids are available only at NARA and at the
Wisconsin Historical Society.
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o lists of defendants, counsel for both sides, judges, witnesses
o explanatory material (charts, list of evidence file groups, etc.)
• a “Who Was Who” in Nazi Germany
• an explanation of how trial documents are organized, structured, and
analyzed
• a choice of basic or advanced fielded search for documents (for NMT
trials 1–4 and 7 so far) and document images
• keyword search for trial transcripts (for NMT trials 1–4 and 7 so far)
• a collection of two hundred digitized photographs related to the trials
• a history and description of the project, including funding timeline
As of this writing, the Nuremberg Trials Project website has 55,285 pages analyzed,
uploaded, and ready for inspection. These include the trial-related “case files” for cases
1–4 and 7, plus “evidence files”—documents relevant to cases 1 and 2, and a partial set
for case 4. These documents are interlinked and fully searchable at
http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu.
With this many documents (and many more to come), design of the search function is
critical. Historians and researchers will appreciate the number of search options available.
Within any given trial, one can filter results by date (a drop-down menu lists all dates that
trial was in session), author, defendant, or trial issue. For example, for trial 1, the Medical
Trial, clicking on “Karl Gebhardt,” one of the twenty-three defendants, returns sixty-nine
results: sixty-eight individual documents and the transcript itself, where he is mentioned
numerous times. Clicking on the title of any of the listed documents brings up an image
of the paper document, with a magnification option. The results can be further sorted by
date, relevance, or document length.
In this example, clicking on the first title in the list brings up an image of a 1946 affidavit
by Oswald Pohl about medical experiments on concentration camp inmates. The
document has an original Nuremberg evidence code of NO-65. The information panel to
the right of the image provides links to the author and to the defendants mentioned.
Clicking on the evidence code number, NO-65, brings one to a list of all forms of this
document: a photostat of the German original, a German transcript of it, an English
translation of it, and a “staff evidence analysis” focusing on its usefulness for the
prosecution. All of these images can be downloaded as PDF files.
The “Advanced Search” option at the bottom of the home page enables users to focus
their search requests. The page gives a high-level overview of all ten thousand individual
items currently available on the website, and users can narrow a search by material type,
date, trial, defendant, author (101 to date), language, source, or trial issue. It is perhaps
this last choice that researchers will find most useful: eighty issues are listed so far,
ranging from “hostage-taking and reprisal actions” to “sterilization experiments.” Trial
issues are taken from a controlled list, as are names for case files.
The ability to search through this immense trove of records and quickly pull out all
documents related to a specific issue, such as the “Night and Fog Decree,” is an example
7
Haran: Harvard Law School's Nuremberg Trials Project
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of the power of digitization. Having the trial record online opens up research possibilities
that did not previously exist or that would have taken a prohibitively long time to
achieve. The website can instantly access eighty-six documents relevant to this issue; a
search of the best alternative site (Library of Congress Military Legal Resources, with
online versions of the many volumes of excerpts from the trial records) brings up
nothing.
The success of the search function on the website stems directly from the painstaking
work of the document analyst/historian. All of the 55,000-plus pages now available on
the site have been analyzed by one person; he returned to the project in 2014 when
funding once again became available after a gap of some twelve years.
It’s All about the Metadata
From its inception in 1998 until today, the Nuremberg Trials Project has been driven by
metadata—metadata at the item/document level, not at the series level. Collecting and
recording this metadata takes time; an average-length document requires up to fifteen
minutes of analysis. (Documents prepared but not used in the trials require less analysis
and can be processed more quickly.) Twenty-one pieces of data are extracted by the
historian and entered into the database that underlies the search function of the site.
21
The
most time-consuming of the analyst’s tasks has been creating a keyword-rich descriptive
title for each document, matching the relevant people or entities to controlled lists, and
identifying where in the trial transcript the document is introduced. The metadata schema
is loosely based on Dublin Core, according to interviews with librarians involved in the
project in its early years.
The Larger Picture: A Landscape of Silos, Linked by Google
It has often been said that the more digital libraries one looks at, the more bewildering the
landscape becomes. They are all so different in structure, selection of content, and ease of
use (or lack thereof) that meaningful comparisons are hard to make. Only a handful of
digital libraries cover ground at all similar to this project. The ones that stand out are
Yale University’s Avalon Project, the Library of Congress, the University of North
Dakota, and NARA:
• The Avalon Project offers a complete online transcript of the
International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (the first, most famous
trial) but without actual page images, evidence files, or links to cited
documents. (The transcript is a copy of that found in the Blue series.)
Many ancillary documents, as well as key documents from trial 4, are
also found on this site. There is no coverage of the other NMT trials.
21
Date, descriptive title, literal title, personal author, group author, trial name and number, transcript page,
trial issue, defendant(s) concerned, language, source, box code, folder number, exhibit number, document
book number, evidence file code letters and number, number of pages, notes, trial document category
(evidence or case file), English versus German trial documents, country submitting evidence (for IMT).
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• The Library of Congress site offers searchable PDF versions of the
original Blue, Green, and Red series.
• The University of North Dakota has digitized 1,100 pages (of their
240,000-page collection) related to the German invasion and
occupation of Norway, in a project funded by the Museum of the
Norwegian Resistance in Oslo.
• NARA offers PDF finding aids describing the contents of hundreds of
microfilm rolls of Nuremberg documents. Its website search engine
also serves as a finding aid to the vast archives of original paper and
microfilmed Nuremberg documents. A small number of items are
available online, but in most cases, it is only by visiting Washington or
by purchasing microfilm (in either original or digitized format) that a
researcher can see the actual documents. There are, for example, 48
rolls just for trial 7, not one of the longer trials; the total cost to
purchase digitized microfilm for this trial alone, at $125/roll, would be
$6,000.
Other than the University of North Dakota, the repositories holding large collections of
Nuremberg documents have apparently decided against digitization, perhaps out of
awareness of the project at Harvard. In any event, there exists no digital collection to
which the Nuremberg Project can be directly compared.
American archives hold many collections of personal papers of trial participants; twenty-
six such collections (from twenty-three men—judges, prosecutors, and one psychiatrist)
are listed in appendix B. Similar collections donated by German attorneys no doubt exist
outside of the United States. All of these collections have an online presence, although in
sixteen cases it consists of just a finding aid. Of the remaining ten collections with
digitized material, half have a significant number of items. The ten repositories holding
these manuscripts offer a widely varying selection of private notes, newspaper clippings,
trial documents, photographs, and ephemera, searchable by title or description.
Transcribed documents are searchable by content as well. In no case were criteria for
selection explained.
The collection of Judge Paul Hebert’s papers at Louisiana State University (LSU) is a
typical example. Hosted on Digital Commons, the site is easy to navigate, and the
selected material is presented in a visually attractive manner. One can search for terms in
title, description, and transcribed content (if transcription has been done). However, only
forty-seven documents are available for review; examining the rest of the collection
requires a visit to Baton Rouge. Even finding out how extensive the Hebert Collection is
(fifty linear feet) requires a detour via a search engine to the completely separate LSU
library site. Here one finds the usual link to a PDF finding aid, where one can read about
the 49.9 feet of not-yet-digitized material. This reviewer found no easy way to navigate
between the Digital Commons Hebert Collection and the description of the larger
collection at the library site, as neither has a direct link to the other.
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Haran: Harvard Law School's Nuremberg Trials Project
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At the other extreme is Harvard University’s collection of Assistant Counsel Drexel
Sprecher’s papers. Although the collection contains over 22,000 pages, every single item
has been digitized and is easily found on the well-organized website. Not only is the
digitized material readily accessible; the links are embedded into the container list of the
finding aid, thus making extra searching unnecessary. The collections of Thomas Dodd’s
papers at the University of Connecticut and the Donovan Collection at Cornell are also
worthy of note, with over 1,500 digitized items apiece.
These digital libraries are hosted on widely varying platforms. Some are intuitive and
easy to use, while others present more of a challenge. Examining these twenty-six
collections, one is struck above all by the wide range of user interfaces. With the
exception of those hosted on commercial platforms such as bepress, these sites show little
similarity in terms of arrangement or navigation strategy.
In three of these cases, a donor’s personal papers are split between two repositories. None
of these six websites inform the user of this fact. Even the Robert Houghton Jackson
Center, a standalone nonprofit organization and archive devoted to the life and work of
the former Supreme Court justice, fails to mention that some of Jackson’s papers are held
at the Library of Congress. None of the repositories refer the reader to collections about
Nuremberg personnel held elsewhere. (Each trial had multiple judges and prosecutors, so
links to the relevant archives would be of great help to those researching any given trial.)
The only way to get a complete picture of archival holdings related to Nuremberg is to
use a search engine. And, of course, it is entirely possible that other collections of
relevant personal papers exist in the United States with no online presence at all, not even
a finding aid.
All of this leads one to wonder, would it not be useful for repositories to become more
aware of outside resources that are related to their own holdings? Providing linkage to
related collections would be a common courtesy to researchers, save everyone a lot of
time, cost nothing, and reflect well on each participating archive. Perhaps it is high time
we got out of our silos and started cooperating.
Lessons Learned from the Harvard Project
Creating a digital library is a long, iterative process; even with the best of funding and
intentions, things rarely come together quickly. Given the usual interruptions in or
scarcity of funding, putting together a digital library of any significance can take years,
and the task often outlasts the careers of those with the original vision. Such has been the
case with this project. Some institutional knowledge has been lost with the inevitable
departure of early participants. The current project manager notes the following as among
the lessons learned:
• The project historian is still entering metadata into the same standalone
Access database originally set up twenty years ago, although the
project now relies on distributed metadata-creation workflows.
Implementing a web-based suite of metadata-creation tools backed by
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an appropriate database will allow the project to become far more
efficient and stable in this area.
• Until recently, funding efforts were intermittent, less focused and
persistent than required. Understanding the funding landscape,
identifying key institutional decision-makers, and coordinating with
them have led to improved prospects for finding the resources to see
the project through to completion.
• The first transcript was keyed in from a copy on microfilm (obtained
from NARA), the work having been outsourced to an overseas firm;
the results were not good enough to use without subsequent extensive
editing.
• OCR technology and workflows to fully correct raw output have vastly
improved since the project’s early days, allowing close to 100-percent
integrity in the rendering of transcript and document machine-readable
text. The resulting full-text keyword-search capability adds enormous
power to the suite of discovery options the project can offer to users of
the website.
• The expert analysis necessary to create rich metadata for materials as
varied as these trial documents is well worth the cost and effort.
Relying exclusively on automation in this area would severely restrict
the resulting points of access available to end users.
• Documentation of metadata workflows, website design, and website
coding decisions is critically important for future staff who will need
to build out the project’s current contents and shape. It is important for
those who come after us to be aware of why the project is structured as
it is.
Other issues worth noting include the following:
• Content development has so far relied on a single person, due to
funding restrictions. With full funding, having a team of historians,
lawyers, and other subject experts working on document analysis will
enhance the project on many levels and reduce the inevitable loss of
institutional knowledge when the current person retires.
• Harvard has an excellent History Department. Faculty and graduate
student involvement in the content end of this project could
considerably enhance the knowledge base of the website, assist with
usability issues, and possibly even provide some extra hands for
document analysis.
• The project has relied on an internal controlled vocabulary created by
one person. Ideally, it would have been optimal to use a recognized
controlled vocabulary, such as the Library of Congress Name
Authority File or the Virtual International Authority File. Linkage out
to other collections in the future will require reconciling the existing
vocabulary with one or more of these entities.
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Impact Measures
When the project website was launched in 2003, news organizations in the United States
and abroad covered the event. The project team gave interviews to reporters from the
Boston Globe and to Boston and German TV news teams. Since that time, the site has
steadily attracted several hundred visitors per day. A survey done recently for a grant
application showed that several thousand websites (in over twenty languages) have linked
to the Nuremberg Trials Project. According to Google Scholar, over a hundred scholarly
articles and hundreds of books have cited the project website since its launch.
2020: An Anniversary
Aware of the impending seventy-fifth anniversary of the trials’ commencement in the fall
of 1945 and the opportunity to tie in completion of the project with international attention
to the trials, project managers decided in 2016 to take a proactive approach: to analyze
the work remaining to be done in such detail that a reasonably exact estimate could be
made of the funds needed to wrap up the project. They created a manual describing the
work involved in “unitization” (clustering digital page images into documents),
“objective coding” (basic document identification), and “subjective coding” (detailed
document analysis—the work the project historian has been doing intermittently since
1998), and gave it to two legal document-analysis firms to see if non-historians were able
to adequately process and analyze the trial and source documents. The results were
encouraging, and enough data was gathered to make a useful cost and time estimate for
completion of the project. Outreach to likely funders is in process, and signs point to a
successful outcome in the near future.
Project staff are optimistic about uploading all of the thirteen Nuremberg trials, with all
of the relevant documents, in time for the seventy-fifth anniversary. But that is far from
the end. If digitization is seen as an initial phase, document analysis and upload as a
second phase, then a third phase—still on the drawing board—opens up exciting
possibilities. This phase could include linkage from the website out to related collections
around the world, as well as to entities such as DBpedia, “a crowd-sourced community
effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and make this information
available on the Web.”
22
In addition, API delivery of document metadata (i.e., delivery to
machines by means of an “application programming interface”) is anticipated. With these
features and others still under discussion (or awaiting discovery), it appears certain that
the Nuremberg Trials Project will become the premier resource for research into this
fascinating episode of twentieth-century history.
Appendix A. U.S. Recipients of Trial Records in 1949
Most academic libraries own the official published volumes of trial records, referred to as
the Blue, Red, and Green series. The list here refers to the actual trial records only (bound
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“Learn about DBpedia.”
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or unbound), and not to these published, multivolume series. Records are paper unless
otherwise noted.
Center for Research Libraries, Chicago: extensive holdings (all 13 trials)
Columbia University: extensive holdings (all 13 trials)
Harvard Law School: 1 million pages of trial records (all 13 trials, partly digitized)
Hoover Institution/Stanford University: 75 linear feet, IMT only
National Archives and Records Administration: complete paper and microfilm record
University of Cincinnati: 50 volumes, IMT transcript plus index
University of Georgia Law School: several indictments, opening/closing statements, and
judgments, plus dissenting opinions, motions, and transcripts of a few videos. Trial 11,
the Ministries Trial, is exceptionally well documented
(http://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/nuremberg/)
University of Michigan: 413 volumes covering trials 1–12 (and possibly IMT)
University of North Dakota: 240,000 pages total; 1,100 documents related to occupation
of Norway digitized (https://library.und.edu/digital/nuremberg-transcripts/)
University of Southern California: 300 boxes of transcripts of all 13 trials (this repository
was not mentioned in any contemporaneous source as a recipient)
University of Washington School of Law: 1,236 bound volumes (all 13 trials)
Correspondence at the end of 2017 with the following “named recipients” revealed no
significant collections of trial documents. Institutions marked ** have related collections
of personal papers of trial participants—see appendix B.
Cornell University**
Duke University
Georgetown University**
New York Public Library
Northwestern University
Princeton University
U.S. Military Academy at West Point
University of Arkansas
University of California, Berkeley
University of Chicago
University of Nebraska
University of Texas**
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University of Wisconsin
Appendix B. Principal U.S. Collections of Personal Papers Related to the Trials
Nürnberg Krupp Trial Papers of Hu C. Anderson, Vanderbilt University, Nashville,
Tenn.: https://krupp.library.vanderbilt.edu
Walter Beals Papers, University of Washington, Seattle:
http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv47470
Francis Biddle Collection, University of Syracuse, Syracuse, N.Y.:
https://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/b/biddle_f.htm
Francis Biddle Papers, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.:
https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/559026
Judge Mallory Blair Collection, Guide to Trial Notebooks from Nuremberg Justice Case,
University of Texas, Austin: https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utlaw/00022/law-
00022.html
Edward F. Carter Papers, Nebraska Historical Society, Lincoln:
https://history.nebraska.gov/collections/edward-francis-carter-1897-1981-rg4231am
William Christianson Papers, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.:
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn502047
Richard Dillard Dixon Papers, East Carolina University, Greenville, N.C.:
https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/special/ead/findingaids/0601/
Richard Dillard Dixon Papers, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: http://finding-
aids.lib.unc.edu/03567/
Thomas Dodd Papers, University of Connecticut, Storrs:
http://archives.lib.uconn.edu/islandora/object/20002%3A20
Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.:
https://newcatalog.library.cornell.edu/catalog/8924801
Benjamin Ferencz Papers, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.:
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn508277
Paul H Gantt Nuremberg Trial Papers, Towson University, Towson, Md.:
http://library.towson.edu/digital/collection/gantt
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Winfield B. Hale Papers, University of Tennessee, Knoxville:
http://dlc.lib.utk.edu/spc/view?docId=ead/0012_002411_000000_0000/0012_002411_00
0000_0000.xml
Hebert Nuremberg Collection, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge:
https://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/nuremberg/
Robert H. Jackson Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.:
https://www.loc.gov/item/mm83061408/
Robert H. Jackson Papers, Robert H. Jackson Center Archive, Jamestown, N.Y.:
https://www.roberthjackson.org/archive/
Douglas McGlashan Kelley Papers, University of California, Santa Cruz:
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt5d5nc7tj/entire_text/
Robert Kempner Papers, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.:
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn502566
Michael A. Musmanno Papers, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh:
http://guides.library.duq.edu/musmanno-nuremberg
John Johnston Parker Papers, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: http://finding-
aids.lib.unc.edu/03566/
Harold Sebring Papers, Stetson University, DeLand, Fla.:
http://digital.archives.stetson.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/LawSebring
Drexel Sprecher Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston:
https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/DASPP.aspx
Sprecher Collection, Harvard Law School Library, Cambridge, Mass.:
http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~law00216
Telford Taylor Papers, Columbia University, New York:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_10199444/
Charles Wennerstrum Papers, Drake University Law School, Des Moines, Iowa:
http://www.drake.edu/law/library/collections/special-collections/
John C. Young Papers, Truman Library, Independence, Mo. (in which case 12, the “High
Command Trial,” is particularly well documented):
https://www.trumanlibrary.org/hstpaper/youngjc.htm
Bibliography
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Catalogue of Nuremberg Documents. London, Wiener Library, 1961. Mimeographed list
of their holdings, organized into prosecution documents, defense documents, and a sixty-
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Epstein, Fritz. “Washington Research Opportunities in the Period of World War II.”
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Kempner, Robert. “The Nuremberg Trials as Sources of Recent German Political and
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whether the document has appeared in other publications. Names, places, subjects,
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———. “Forum Juridicum: An Outline of the Research and Publication Possibilities of
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