Law School Archives Nuremberg

The Harvard Law School Library announced yesterday that it was launching a new website as part of a multi-million dollar effort to preserve and showcase its enormous archive of Nuremburg Trials papers.

The Nuremberg Trials Project is based on Harvard’s collection of one million pages, including trial documents and transcripts from the 12 Nuremburg trials and International Military Tribunal that tried German war criminals after World War II.

The project seeks to preserve what transpired at the trials and record how prosecutors handled the cases.

According to Harry S. Martin ’65, a librarian and professor at Harvard Law School, the project was launched in part because the documents—which have often been used by scholars over the years due to their significance to international human civil rights law—have become too fragile to be handled.

Martin said that the project was made possible by a $100,000 grant from the Kenneth and Evelyn Lipper Foundation to preserve the documents. He said that while most librarians do not yet view the web as a suitable preservation medium, the digital repository offers a wider distribution and a longer time-frame. The project’s founders have been experimenting with the website for almost four years.

Martin said the project could help prove the benefit of the web to preservation and would open up public access to the important legal documents of Nuremberg.

“I think that every generation should have the opportunity to be able to confront this period of history because it was significant and horrific,” he said. “So there is a remembrance aspect to it. I’m not Jewish, but I don’t think the Holocaust should be forgotten.”

Martin notes that the material currently available on the website comprises only about 7,000 out of one million pages of documentation. The first stage of the project presents documents relating to the medical case commonly known as the Doctors’ Trial, involving 23 defendants accused of inflicting harmful and fatal medical experiments on prisoners.

The group hopes to complete the analysis and photography of the documents in the next ten years.

“I hope somebody drops another five to six million on us so we can finish,” Martin said. “It is a multi-million, multi-year project if we can proceed.”

Saltonstall Professor of History Charles S. Maier ’60, also a Crimson editor, said that “the quality of the material is very high.” He said that though the sheer amount of information may be overwhelming for many undergraduates, the website would be very helpful for seniors working on a particular subject. He said the website could also aid law students because it showed “how officials assembled and evaluated the evidence, which could be very helpful in legal procedure.”

—MEGAN C. HARNEY