80 years after the Nazis were tried for war crimes, the documents are online for all to see

80 years after prosecutors began trying the leaders of german nazi federal republic of germany for state of war crimes, the documents related to to those trials are available in full online, and free of charge.

It took researchers at the Harvard Law School Library more than 20 years to digitize its more than 150,000 Nuremberg Trials documents into a searchable online database alongside analysis, summaries and photographs.

Paul Deschner, the project’s technical lead, says it was well worth the effort. 

“Access to these documents is crucial at any point in history, including our own, to be able to understand the dynamics of what can make these sorts of events possible,” Deschner told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

Called The Nuremberg Trials Project, the website launched on the 80th anniversary of the first day of the trials on Nov. 20, 1945.

The Nuremberg Trials were designed to hold Nazi leaders accountable for the atrocities Germany committed during the Second World War, including the murder of six million Jewish people during the Holocaust. 

Over the course of the first trial, Allied leaders indicted 24 defendants, convicted 19, sentenced 12 to death, one of whom took his own life before his scheduled execution.

Nearly 200 more Nazis were convicted in the 12 subsequent Nuremberg trials convened by the United States.

At the time, the trials were thoroughly reported and raptly followed. Today, they are widely considered among the most consequential court proceedings in modern history, creating a framework for dealing with mass atrocities on a global stage.

Nevertheless, Deschner says the details of those trials — and the horrors that preceded them — are already fading from collective memory.

“I know it's a real issue, even within Germany itself, that people of the younger generations are simply losing even tangential awareness of concepts like Auschwitz and the Final Solution and all of that vocabulary, " he said

Auschwitz refers to a complex of Nazi extermination camps in which an estimated 1.1 million victims were killed.

The Final Solution refers to Nazi Germany’s official policy of genocide against Jews, which  Deschner says was described in a chillingly mundane and bureaucratic language at the time. 

Harvard says its collection of Nuremberg Trial documents is the second largest in the world outside of the U.S. National Archives. It includes complete trial transcripts, in English, for all 13 Nuremberg trials, as well as briefs and evidence exhibits.

The law library received its first trove of documents in 1949 after the final trial concluded, and has added to its collection over time since then. 

It began the painstaking process of digitizing the collection in 1998, at which point many of the original documents, which were stored in boxes, had begun to crumble. 

It was important, Deschner says, not to simply dump them online, but to also make sure they were well organized and searchable, with detailed summaries and additional context. 

“I think it was felt that that was definitely a collection that we wanted to make more accessible,” Deschner says.

While many people have contributed to the project over the years, he says the bulk of the work was done by a small team of people who had to pore over the documents in excruciating detail. 

“In one or two cases, they had to sort of say, OK, I need to put a limit on the number of hours I can sit here and deal with this material,” he said. “The strategy of dosing was important for them.”

The goal of the project, Deschner says, aligns with one of the key purposes of the trials themselves — to create a detailed archive of a horrifying history that people can use to navigate their present. 

“It's a rich archive, which I simply hope people will explore and get from it what they can, and also to use as possibly a lens through which to understand not simply history locked away and siloed somewhere, but also ... as a set of patterns that can always be repeated,” Deschner said.

“You want to be able to recognize them when you think they might be.”

Interview with Paul Deschner produced by Chloe Shantz-Hilkes

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