Nuremberg Trials Project - - Introduction. About the Project.
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 2. 00. 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 1. The HLS Library managed a second phase of the project in 2. NMT 1 transcript, and in the late spring of 2. Cases 2 and 4 of the NMT trials. NMT 2 (U. S. A. v. Erhard Milch) took place in 1. Milch was indicted on counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The prosecution presented 1. The defense presented 5. Milch himself. NMT 4 (U. S. A. v. Pohl et al.) took place in 1. 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 1. WVHA- managed concentration camps and labor camps of the SS, where up to 1. Materials Currently Provided by the Project. 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 5,8. The keyed text of the first seven days of court proceedings in the NMT 1 trial transcript (through December 1. 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 2. Nuremberg Tribunals from the Harvard Library's Visual Information Access (VIA) catalog. See, in particular: Contents of the Collection. The Nuremberg Trials collection fills some 6. 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 (2. SUBSCRIBE: http:// Google+: http:// Facebook: http:// Twitter: http:// US Army 1950. No trial provides a better basis for understanding the nature and causes of evil than do the Nuremberg trials from 1945 to 1949. Those who come to the trials expecting to find sadistic monsters are generally disappointed. NMT trials and the IMT trial (1. 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. Funding. 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 1. After a Ford fellowship in law and economics in Paris, he began a career as an investment banker, founding Lipper & Company in 1. He served as Deputy Mayor of New York City from 1. 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. Nuremberg Trial. World War IIThey didn’t look like much. With a couple of exceptions, they were just a gaggle of wan, morose, rumpled men, mostly middle- aged or elderly. Some paid close attention to what went on around them. Some seemed not to care. Taken as a group they were unimpressive, the kind of people one could pass on the street and never notice. But once they had come extremely close to ruling the world. The trial had begun on November 2. Twenty- one tired- looking men sat in two rows in a Nuremberg courtroom, on trial for their lives. They were what remained of the top leadership of the Thousand- Year Reich, and just short months before, they had cast very long shadows indeed. Now those days were just a bitter memory, already fading in the hunger and depression of postwar occupied Germany. The ground rules for the war crimes prosecutions were straightforward in theory, although they were sometimes a little hard to administer in practice. Traitors would be dealt with by their own nations. The British, for example, duly tried the odious William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw- Haw, for his propaganda broadcasts from Nazi Germany. Too late, American- born Joyce tried to repudiate his claim to British citizenship. His apostasy did not save him from the gallows. Small fry–the ordinary killers and such–would be tried by courts- martial. And those Germans who had committed crimes centered in the countries that Germany had occupied during the conflict would be dealt with in those countries. Thus Karl- Hermann Frank, the repulsive Reichsprotektor of the Czech Protectorate, was tried and publicly executed in Prague in 1. Czechs looked on. A number of trials also took place in the Far East. Many Japanese, both civilian and military, were tried for wartime atrocities. Twenty- eight of the top leaders were tried by the International Military Tribunal, with 1. The trial lasted two years, and all the defendants were convicted. In Europe, most of the minor trials were held within the zones of occupation by the respective occupiers. American courts tried the concentration- camp staff at Dachau; the British dealt with the brutal Belsen guards; other Germans were tried in Denmark, Belgium, Russia, or wherever their crimes were alleged to have taken place. For the rest, many of the more important European trials were held in Berlin. The ones that drew the most attention, however, took place in Nuremberg. There were 1. 2 of them altogether, all involving important figures in World War II Germany. The International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg would deal with ‘major defendants, in the words of Robert Jackson, America’s chief prosecutor. Less clearly, the Tribunal would also address the criminal character of certain organizations, including the Sicherheistdienst (State Security Service), the SS, and the Gestapo. And here the character of the trials diverged from the ordinary course of criminal justice. Findings in the main trial, said Jackson, that an organization is criminal in nature will be conclusive in any subsequent proceedings against individual members…. This was an uncomfortable concept, this idea of guilt by membership. And, as it turned out, the theory was largely unnecessary to the prosecutions; the accused German leaders had done enough ugly things that party membership was not necessary to convict them of serious crimes. The offenses charged against the defendants fell generally into three categories. First, there were war crimes, a fairly well- defined class of offenses long recognized by most soldiers, which included maltreatment of POWs (prisoners of war), murdering wounded men, and similar offenses. The second category comprised offenses against humanity– various atrocities, contrary to generally accepted notions of criminal law, that had been committed on racial grounds since the Nazi rise to power in 1. Such offenses had been recognized as criminal at least since the Hague Convention of 1. Last, and least clearly drawn, were crimes against peace, the making of aggressive war. Although most laypeople would agree that war is by nature aggressive, a line was drawn between defensive war (permitted) and offensive war (punishable). Early on, in the charter that established the system, obedience to orders was banned as a defense. It might be raised in mitigation of a sentence, but it would not support an acquittal. The Nuremberg defendants were divided into groups, mostly according to their wartime activities and positions. There were, for example, the medical trials, a prosecution of doctors and other medical officials for the hideous experiments that maimed and murdered countless concentration- camp inmates and POWs. Those defendants were the white- coated killers who had injected helpless people with urine and gasoline and typhus, who had ruptured prisoners’ lungs in high- altitude experiments, who had sterilized men with massive, burning doses of X- rays. Twenty- three defendants were tried in that single proceeding. Seven were acquitted; seven were sentenced to death; nine others went to prison, some of them for life. All 1. 2 trials were convened under an Allied mandate called Law No. London Charter on the prosecution of war criminals. The dozen trials involved some 1. Twenty- two government ministers faced justice, along with 5. SS. Twenty- six military officers, 3. Four of the accused committed suicide; four more were excused from prosecution because of age or illness. Of the 1. 77 actually tried, 3. Twenty- four of the rest were sentenced to death. Twenty more received life sentences; 9. But the famous trial was the prosecution before the International Military Tribunal, the litigation most people recognized simply as the Nuremberg Trial. That trial was special, the proceeding against the major figures of Hitlerian Germany, the big names who in the public eye represented all the brutality and aggression, the murderous racial theories and the countless killings. And it was fitting that those men were tried in Nuremberg. Gutted by Allied bombs, a moonscape of ruins, legendary, medieval Nuremberg had once been the Valhalla of National Socialism. This lovely old city had seen the biggest of the party rallies: the serried ranks of the Nazi faithful, the bands crashing out the Horst Wessel Lied, the massed swastika flags, the booming chant of Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! when the Führer finished one of his electrifying speeches. Now, in this first dreary, full year of peace, the men who had led Germany down her tragic road were going to pay the bills. Ghosts of a myriad of innocents long dead were rising again. Their cold presence was in the very courtroom, somehow all the more terrifying as they lingered in the shadows behind the matter- of- fact arguments by a series of international prosecutors. Hitler was not in the dock, of course, the arch criminal himself. The Führer had sent old men and boys to die, firing Panzerfausts at Soviet tanks in the ruins of Berlin, but he had saved the easy road for himself: a single pistol shot. Heinrich Himmler, the petit bourgeois snob, had gone the same way. Captured by the British in Lüneburg, Himmler had crushed a vial of poison between his teeth and departed for whatever special hell is reserved for those who murder helpless people by the millions. One other famous figure was not present, though he was still on trial in absentia. Martin Bormann, the crass, crude, calculating chief of the Nazi Party Chancellery. In the last days of the war, Bormann had disappeared in the shell- torn horror of wrecked Berlin. He was dead, some men said, but others were not so sure. Without positive proof of his death, he remained a defendant, the Brown Eminence still, a shadow at the back of the prisoners’ dock. But most of the other old familiar names were there. There was Rudolph Hess, the demented longtime deputy party leader, who had flown to Scotland in May 1. Much to his surprise and anger, he had languished in a British prison ever since. Next to Hess sat Der Dicke (The Fat One), Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, chief of the Luftwaffe and once Hitler’s heir apparent. A legitimate ace fighter pilot in World War I, Göring had gone on to sybaritic luxury, almost unbounded power, and a host of Wagnerian illusions. Now he was simply a somewhat deflated fat man in a plain, baggy uniform. In the back row sat Albert Speer, architect and engineer. Speer was a remarkable man, always something of a loner in Nazi Party circles, creator of the phenomenal surge in German war production even under the shower of Allied bombs. Highly intelligent, basically decent, in the last days of the war Speer saved Germany’s future at the risk of his own life. He had countermanded Hitler’s Götterdämmerung order to burn and destroy all that remained of German resources. Nevertheless, Speer had used slave laborers by the millions to supply Germany’s war machine. For that he would be tried as a major war criminal. Sitting together at the other end of the back row were the senior officers of the vanquished German navy. A dedicated Nazi, Grossadmiral Erich Raeder had commanded the Kriegsmarine until January 1. Hitler to scrap the surface fleet. As the author of unrestricted submarine warfare, Raeder faced charges of war crimes. Raeder’s companion, Admiral Karl Dönitz, had succeeded Raeder as chief of the German navy. Also a convinced party member, Dönitz was appointed Hitler’s successor in the Führer‘s will. As Germany fell apart around him, he spent his few days in office trying to negotiate a peace, largely with the Western Allies alone. Dönitz was the U- boat master, the single commander who came closest to winning the war for Germany; his boats sank some 1. Allied shipping. Had Hitler listened to his urgings to build up the U- boat fleet at all costs, who knows how the war might have ended? Joachim von Ribbentrop was there, too, the ex- champagne salesman who had risen to be Hitler’s closest adviser on foreign policy and foreign minister of Germany.
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