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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 November 2025, the Library has digitized all of the trials which are accessible on the Nuremberg Trials Project website: