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 is undertaking a multi-stage digitization project. The Nuremberg Trials Project is an open-access initiative to create and present digitized images or full-text versions of the Library's Nuremberg documents, descriptions of each document, and general information about the trials.

Launched in 2003 at the completion of the first stage of digitization, the Nuremberg Trials Project presented 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.

The HLS Library managed a second phase of the project in 2004-2005 to transcribe and edit the NMT 1 transcript, and in the late spring of 2011 completed a third stage by digitizing all of the documents from and relating to Cases 2 and 4 of the NMT trials.

NMT 2 (U.S.A. v. Erhard Milch) took place in 1946-1947. Milch was indicted on counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The prosecution presented 161 written exhibits and 3 witnesses. The defense presented 51 written exhibits, 30 witnesses, and testimony by Milch himself. NMT 4 (U.S.A. v. Pohl et al.) took place in 1947. Chief of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (Wirtschafts und Verwaltungshauptant, WVHA), Oswald Pohl and seventeen other WVHA official were charged with conspiracy to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership in a criminal organization. The crimes occurred between 1942 and 1945 in WVHA-managed concentration camps and labor camps of the SS, where up to 10,000,000 individuals were imprisoned.

The Nuremberg Trials Project currently provides access to the following materials for three United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals, NMT 1 (U.S.A. v. Karl Brandt et al.), NMT 2 (U.S.A. v. Erhard Milch), and NMT 4 (U.S.A. v. Pohl et al.):

• A database of 5,842 descriptions of trial documents, enabling search by document title, author, defendant, evidence code number, exhibit number, date, transcript page number, and other fields.
• 32,511 pages, digitized in color, of all prosecution and defense trial documents and related evidence file documents.
• The keyed text of the first seven days of court proceedings in the NMT 1 trial transcript (through December 13, 1946: approximately 500 pages).
• An introduction to the project, the trials, the documents, and the transcripts.
• 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.

Users may also access over 200 digitized photographs from the Nuremberg Tribunals from the Harvard Library's Visual Information Access (VIA) catalog. See, in particular:

• 60 photographs of Nuremberg Trials defendants, judges, and trial activities for the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in 1945-1946, and
• 159 photographs taken during the proceedings of NMT 3 (U.S.A. v. Josef Altstoetter et al.) in 1947.

The Nuremberg Trials collection fills some 690 boxes, with an average box containing approximately 1,500 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.

The Harvard Law School Library now seeks additional funding to digitize the remaining nine NMT trials and the IMT trial, and to provide full-text access to all documents in the Nuremberg Trials Project digital collection.