Nuremberg trial records made available online after painstaking 25-year project | Nazism

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/20/digitised-official-records-of-nuremberg-trials-made-available-online

23 comments

  1. A fully digitised collection of the records of the Nuremberg trials is being launched online to mark the 80th anniversary of the start of the groundbreaking legal effort to bring Nazi leaders to justice.

    Open access to every official document from the trial, held by the Harvard law school library, will be available to all researchers, whether amateur or professional, for the first time from Thursday after a 25-year endeavour by a 30-strong team of historians, metadata curators and librarians.

    It began in 1998 with the removal of staples and paperclips from the delicate documents so they could be scanned. Paul Deschner, who led Harvard’s Nuremberg trials project, said that from the start the aim had been to digitise everything held on the court proceedings in the library’s collection, which had until then been kept in boxes and rarely seen. The goal was twofold: “to preserve these documents, which were starting to literally disintegrate as soon as they were touched, because they were … on 1940s-era acid-based mimeographed paper, and simply couldn’t withstand being handled, and to make them accessible in the dawn of the internet era”.

    The library’s collection contains more than 750,000 pages of transcripts, briefs and evidence exhibits from across the total of 13 cases, which between 1945 and 1949 were brought against Nazi military and political leaders held responsible for atrocities against humanity, in particular the Holocaust, and revolutionised international human rights law. In the first and main proceedings, 19 of the most influential Nazis including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer were tried. In 12 subsequent trials, almost 200 were put on trial. In all, only three were found not guilty. Twelve received death sentences and others life sentences or shorter.

  5. Sweaty guy looking at both red buttons meme. “Epstein files” “Nuremberg records”

  6. Journos need to pull quotes out of all that to compare with the new Nazis. it’ll all be the same only spelled correctly and in full sentences.

  7. Just in time for the US Coast Guard to give the ok to Nazi symbols.

  8. Meanwhile… Hegseth tells the Coast Guard that swastikas and nooses aren’t hate symbols. SMH

  10. Perfect timing for countries who are being complicit in genocides and those being accused of it. We can use legal precedence as a means to prosecute those responsible for crimes against humanity and enforce international law.

  11. It’s held at Harvard? Download those files. No telling how long they’ll stay up unchallenged.

  13. And for the next one we will do some actual punishment and not funneling to other countries to run their rocket program ✌️

  14. Why does that title have | nazism at the end?

    Also why are you weirdos excited for this? This shit was done a long time ago, probably based on the general level of maturity on Reddit before most of you were born. If you’re one of those historical nuts who loves this shit that’s one thing, good on you for having a hobby that teaches you something, but I can’t see any reason most people would be excited to hear all the procedural bullshit they went through getting charges pressed on anyone they could prove was related to the Nazi war engine.

    Maybe what I should really be asking is why everyone has been going apeshit for “nazi” in recent times, someone somewhere clearly think it’s a good marketing tool apparently not understanding the rational people shut you out the second you go to that degree of ignorant bullshit in a political discussion.

  16. As a librarian and a primary source geek, this is awesome!

  19. Hell for Donald Trump and his entire criminal crew of MAGA Christofascists should be very simple: they are put in a room and they can’t come out until they have read every single word of every page. Trump would never get out. The rest would take centuries. Whether they change or not isn’t even the point.

  20. Typically we are advised just not to bother engaging when conspiracy theorists say “How can you prove it’s true?” But in this case, we should not hesitate to say “Go read the transcripts of the Nuremberg trials”. It’s all there. As soon as he saw the death camps, General Eisenhower knew there would be deniers. So he ordered every detail to be photographed. In the middle of a war, lawyers and translators were brought to the camps to record legally admissible witness statements. The Nazis who were charged got to pick competent defence lawyers. The fact some defendants were found not guilty proves beyond a shadow of a doubt it was not a kangaroo court by the victors.

  22. What are they going to call the trials that follow the current administration?

  23. Do the republicans understand the difference between a list of chargeable offenses and an instruction manual?

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