The Harvard Law School Library has approximately one million pages of documents relating to the trial of military and political leaders of Nazi Germany before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and to the twelve trials of other accused war criminals before the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT).

The documents, which include trial transcripts, briefs, document books, evidence files, and other papers, have been studied by lawyers, scholars, and other researchers in the areas of history, ethics, genocide, and war crimes, and are of particular interest to officials and students of current international tribunals involving war crimes and crimes against humanity.

To preserve the contents of these documents--which are now too fragile to be handled--and to provide expanded access to this material, the Library has begun a digital project to create and present images or full-text versions of its Nuremberg documents on the Internet, along with analytical information about each document and general information about the trials.

The first stage of the project presents documents from and relating to the Medical Case, which was Case 1 of the NMT trials. The Medical Case (U.S.A. v. Karl Brandt et al., also known as the Doctors' Trial) was held in 1946-1947 and involved 23 defendants accused of organizing and participating in war crimes and crimes against humanity in the form of harmful or fatal medical experiments and other medical procedures inflicted on both civilians and prisoners of war.

• 13,904 digital photographs of all pages of all Case 1 prosecution and defense trial documents and related evidence file documents.
• Analytical data on all trial documents and related evidence file documents for NMT 1 (U.S.A. v. Karl Brandt et al.) and NMT 2 (U.S.A. v. Erhard Milch), and most of these documents for NMT 4 (U.S.A. v. Oswald Pohl et al.).
• The keyed text of the first seven days of court proceedings in the Case 1 trial transcript (through December 13, 1946: approximately 500 pages).
• A complete introduction to the project, the documents, and the trials worked on so far.
• A search engine for all the documents that have been analyzed so far (5842 in all).
• A search engine (including full-text queries) for that portion of the Case 1 transcript currently available.
• Links between these various elements.

You can search for material and view it in a variety of ways. For example, you can search for a specific document or a group of documents via the document search engine, and then see the document analysis information for those documents and the images of those that have been photographed. Or you can read the transcript and link to the analytical information and digital photographs of documents cited there. Both the document search engine and the transcript search engine provide multiple ways of conducting searches, including document searches by author, date, literal and descriptive titles, evidence code number, trial date, transcript page number, and transcript searches by keyword, transcript speaker, evidence code number, and page number. For details, see the introductions in the search engines themselves.

The Nuremberg Trials collection fills some 690 boxes, with an average box containing approximately 1500 pages of text (for a total estimated at 1,035,000 pages). The three largest groups of documents are: trial documents (primarily briefs and document books for trial exhibits) for the twelve NMT trials and the IMT trial (280 boxes); trial transcripts for the twelve NMT trials and the IMT trial (154 boxes); and evidence file documents (the photostats, typescripts, and evidence analyses from which the prosecution, and occasionally defendants, drew their exhibits) (200 boxes).

The HLSL collection also includes documents from the IMT hearings on criminal organizations and miscellaneous papers concerning the trials. Most of the documents are in both English and German (and occasionally other languages).

In this project only the English language trial documents and trial transcripts will be presented, but the evidence file documents are usually in both English and German.

Initial funding for the Medical Case pilot project was a grant from the Kenneth & Evelyn Lipper Foundation. Mr. Lipper graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1965. After a Ford fellowship in law and economics in Paris, he began a career as an investment banker, founding Lipper & Company in 1987. He served as Deputy Mayor of New York City from 1983 to 1985.

Mr. Lipper wrote the novels Wall Street and City Hall, wrote and produced the film City Hall and produced the films The Winter Guest and The Last Days, for which he received an Academy Award for best feature length documentary film. Directed by James Moll, The Last Days focuses on four survivors of the Holocaust, using never-before-seen footage painstakingly culled from the massive archive created by the Shoah Visual History Foundation to chronicle the first-hand accounts of Holocaust survivors, eyewitnesses, liberators and rescuers.

Continuing funding to complete the scanning of documents and digitizing of the transcript from the Medical Case is now being sought.