Launch on 80th anniversary of groundbreaking legal effort comes after 25-year project by Harvard law school library
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, 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”.
