Harvard Law School Library Releases Digitized Evidence From Nuremberg Trials

Harvard Law School Library announced the release of digitized transcripts and evidence from the Nuremberg Trials on Thursday, marking the 80th anniversary of the international military tribunal for Nazi leaders and significantly expanding public access to the second-largest archive of the trials.

Researchers at the Library’s Nuremberg Trials Project digitized more than 750,000 pages of archival materials, including evidence and transcripts, previously only accessible in physical form in HLS’ library system.

The release is the latest step in the Library’s decades-long effort to catalogue and digitize the collection, which — outside of the U.S. National Archives holdings — is the most comprehensive set of Nuremberg Trials documents in the world.

“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,” HLS Dean John C.P. Goldberg said in a press release.

“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,” he added.

The project began in 1998 under the leadership of HLS librarian and professor emeritus Harry “Terry” S. Martin III with the goal of indexing the contents of 730 boxes of original materials and enabling remote access for researchers. The development of the internet, according to the project’s longtime technical lead Paul Deschner, “revolutionized” research by allowing scholars to apply digital tools to explore the trials’ extensive archive.

Before Thursday, the Nuremberg Trials Project had only digitized and uploaded roughly 20 percent of the total documents — with evidence from seven of the 13 trials. Now, researchers will have access to digitized records of all the project’s materials from all 13 trials.

Deschner said roughly 40 percent of the thousands of documents — primarily those submitted as evidence during the trials — now include detailed metadata including titles, authors, dates, document numbers, subject headings, and descriptive summaries. This extensive tagging, he added, helps researchers locate testimonies and legal arguments that were previously buried in the archive.

Though Thursday’s release marks a significant milestone, Deschner emphasized that the project remains ongoing. The next phase will focus on making the documents fully machine-readable — a technically demanding process that will enable users to conduct keyword searches across the entire archive.

Though Deschner said the research team did not use artificial intelligence to assign metadata to the documents, he hopes as AI develops, they can use the tool in the future to convert the image scans to text.

The Library’s team has also started to digitize historical records from other historical military trials, including the International Military Tribunal for the Far East — also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal — that was used to prosecute Japanese leaders for war crimes during WWII.

“Preserving legal information is essential work, but preservation alone is not enough. We have a responsibility to open doors and connect this vital knowledge with the world,” Amanda Watson, HLS’s assistant dean for library and information services, said in the press release.

“This collection stands as an answer to one of history’s most critical questions: How can law rise to meet moments of international crisis? Today, we ensure that answer is not locked away but available to all,” she added. “We believe when we make justice visible, we make it possible.”

—Staff writer Caroline G. Hennigan can be reached at caroline.hennigan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cghennigan.