Status: 01.10.2021 12:54 p.m.
The Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals ended 75 years ago. As of today, the case files can be viewed worldwide: Standford University has digitized them and made them searchable.
“I never set up a Jewish extermination camp or promoted their existence.” – The voice of Hans Frank, who his victims also called the “butcher of Poland”, can be heard as an audio recording on the online archive of Stanford University. His lies and his windy puffing around did not help before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg: in 1946 he was found guilty on two of three counts and sentenced to death.
Frank was governor-general of Poland appointed by Hitler. He himself said in court: “If Adolf Hitler personally passed this terrible responsibility on his people, then it will affect me too.” The audio recordings from that time – in excellent, because restored sound quality – are just as much a part of Stanford University’s online archive as the court files, which are now accessible.
It took more than 20 years for the Nuremberg files to finally go online, says David Cohen, professor and director of the Chair of Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford. He is of the opinion that “these documents should not just remain in some archive that is only available to historians and experts. We must make use of today’s technical possibilities to reach a much wider and global audience.”
50 terabytes for thousands of files
Cohen came up with the idea for the open archive, which is a good 50 terabytes in size, in 1998 together with Professor Dieter Simon. Cohen was then at the University of Berkeley, where he ran the War Crimes Center. Simon was director at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main. The special thing about the 5215 files of the Nuremberg Trials is: For the first time in history, a government was in the dock – because of millions of murders.
The prosecutors of the victorious powers succeeded in convicting the German government on the basis of their own files. “The military commanders, the political figures who dealt with the media and propaganda and the people who were responsible for the finances of the government – they were all in Nuremberg,” says Cohen.
Hans Frank’s statement recorded in a digitized document.
Image: exhibits.stanford.edu/
Audio material is to be added
The Nuremberg trial documents originally came from the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington then laboriously digitized the documents. Stanford University took over the text recognition of around 270,000 individual pages.
All of these documents are searchable, says Tom Cramer, head of technology at the Stanford University Library: “To help you find your way around, the Chair of Human Rights has formulated explanatory texts that make connections. The individual documents are divided into different groups, for Example in ‘counts’, ‘closing arguments’ or ‘individual crimes’. “
In addition, a good 1000 hours of audio material should be added in the summer of next year. These are recordings of the trial against the 24 defendants. In addition, the archivists have collected more than six hours of film material, which should also be available in mid-2022.
“Making genocide detectable”
The online archive from California should be of particular help to users who speak German: 64 percent of all documents are in German, says David Cohen. His team at the Chair of Human Rights wants to produce online exhibitions in the coming months in order not only to provide mere documents, but also to classify and explain the process:
Also for people in other countries, not just for Germany or Europe. There are people all over the world who are involved in genocide. We want to make this comprehensible for everyone and in different languages.
Cohen plans, together with the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, to make the twelve follow-up processes also available online. Then the war criminals documents could soon also be stored on German servers.