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Nuremberg Trials Collection at Harvard Law School

This guide is intended to help use the Nuremberg Trials Digitization Project website
This guide assists researchers using the Library's Nuremberg Trials Project website.
 
In this guide, you will find information on:
 
  • Background information about the project
  •  Project updates
  • How to use the website
  •  Resources at Harvard and outside of Harvard
 
Background of the Collection 
 

The Harvard Law School Library holds over one million pages of documents of the Nuremberg trials, one of the most complete sets in the world. The first trials of war criminals were prosecuted before the International Military Tribunal (IMT). Each of the four Allies (the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France) supplied two judges and a prosecution team. The Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT) are the follow-up trials of war criminals held by the United States. Harvard's collection of IMT and NMT trials includes:

  • Trial transcripts
  • Trial briefs
  • Documents submitted into evidence by both prosecution and defense
  • Source documents from which the trial exhibits were selected for use by lawyers
  • Photographs
 
The transcripts were gifts of Harvard Law School (HLS) alumni donors including:
 
  • Ralph G. Albrecht (LL.B. 1923)
  • Francis Biddle (LL.B. 1911)
  • Drexel A. Sprecher (LL.B. 1938)
  • Leonard Wheeler (LL.B. 1925)

Watch this brief video to learn more about the Harvard Law School Library's Nuremberg Collection.

Current Status of Project
 
As of Spring 2021, the Library has digitized 750,000 pages, including 153,000 transcript pages. We have posted five trial transcripts on our website:
 
 
.
We are working on posting the remaining trials listed below.

Digitization of all the documents and transcripts is complete. We are currently processing the prosecution trial documents for all thirteen trials using optical character recognition (OCR) so that every word in these documents is searchable.

 

  • IMT (1946)
  • NMT Case 5: Flick Case (USA v. Friedrich Flick et al. 1947)
  • NMT Case 6: I. G. Farben (USA v. Carl Krauch et al. 1947-48)
  • NMT Case 8: RuSHA Case (USA v. Ulrich Greifelt et al. 1947-48)
  • NMT Case 9: Einsatzgruppen Case (USA v. Otto Ohlendorf et al. 1947-48)
  • NMT Case 10: Krupp Case (USA v. Alfred Krupp et al. 1947-48)
  • NMT Case 11: Ministries Case (USA v. Ernst von Weizsaecker et al. 1947-49)
  • NMT Case 12: High Command Case (USA v. Wilhelm von Leeb et al. 1947-48).
 
 
 

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