Wednesday, November 23, 2005

60th Anniversary of the Opening of the Nuremberg Trials

The Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46 in front of the "International Military Tribunal" were an attempt to grapple with the unparalleled crimes of the Nazi regime and represented the largest undertaking of its kind ever. By the end of the proceedings, some 12 political leaders of the Third Reich had been sentenced to death.

The proceedings started on Nov. 20, 1945. The scene was the southern German city of Nuremberg, the site of some of the Nazi Party's largest pre-war rallies. The Trials laid the foundation for prosecuting war crimes and human rights violations in an international court of law.

There are quite a few digital collections on the topic:

  • A Look Back At Nuremberg (Court TV): introduction to the indictments and defendants, the creation of the tribunal, and selected transcripts from the trials
  • The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (Avalon Project, Yale School of Law): includes motions, orders of the International Military Tribunal, presentation of cases, testimony, documents on Nazi conspiracy and aggression, documents of the Post War Military Government, rules of procedure, subsequent war crimes cases against other Nazis, and many supporting documents
  • Famous World Trials: Nuremberg Trials (part of the Famous Trials collection at the University of Missouri in Kansas City Law School): includes a chronology, profiles of defendants, indictments and sentences, transcripts, images, overview of subsequent trials (doctors' trial, Nazi judges' trial etc.), bibliography
  • Nuremberg Trials Project - Digital Document Collection (Harvard Law School Library): Harvard has one million pages of documents relating to the trial of military and political leaders of Nazi Germany before the International Military Tribunal and to the twelve subsequent trials of other accused war criminals. The documents include trial transcripts, briefs, document books, and evidence files. So, far, Harvard has made available to the public documents relating to the Doctors' Trial of 1946-1947 in which 2 dozen defendants were accused of participating in crimes against humanity in the form of medical experiments on civilians and prisoners of war
  • The Trial of German Major War Criminals (Nizkor Project): Nizkor, one of the world's major resource collections aimed at combatting Holocaust revisionism and Holocaust denial, has made available the record of the trials of 1945-46 (the trial transcripts published in Britain in 1946 by His Majesty's Stationery Office). Nizkor, in Hebrew, means "we will remember".
  • Web Genocide Documentation Centre - Resources on Genocide, War Crimes and Mass Killing (University of the West of England, Bristol): summaries of the Nuremberg Trials and other Nazi war crimes trials (execution squad commandos, murder of POWs, Belsen, Dachau, German High Command, manufacturers of Zyklon B gas used in the extermination camps)
  • Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (Oberlandsgericht Nürnberg - Higher Superior Court of Nuremberg, Department of Justice of Bavaria): description of the trials and indictments, along with links to other websites (see bottom of the page)

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posted by Michel-Adrien at 6:35 pm

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