The Nuremberg State Archives hold the most important written records of the Nuremberg Trials in their collection entitled “Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.” In a collaborative project with the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (BAdW) and Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU), these documents are now being completely digitized and scientifically processed using digital humanities methods.
The Nuremberg Trials, i.e. the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (1945-1946) and twelve subsequent trials conducted by the US government (1946-1949), are now considered a milestone in international criminal law. The trials proved that the crimes of the Third Reich were atoned for not through revenge, but through the means of law. The millions of victims of the Nazi regime were to be given justice through legal proceedings. To this day, the trial documents provide important insights into legal and contemporary history and research into how the Nazi past is dealt with.
The Bavarian Academy of Sciences (BAdW), Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU), and the Bavarian State Archives are facilitating the academic analysis of the Nuremberg follow-up trials using digital humanities methods based on the central records of the Nuremberg State Archives with the project “Digital Nuremberg Military Tribunals” (“DigiNMT”). By specifically approaching the prosecution and the defense, the Nuremberg State Archives were able to acquire extensive file material on the trials after 1946 and preserve it for posterity. Of the original 1.4 kilometers of collection material, 394 linear meters of core records remained after the removal of duplicates and transfers to other institutions, corresponding to approximately 2.5 million sheets. The collection contains official documents from the trials (e.g., indictments, transcripts, briefs, evidence, court orders, judgments, clemency proceedings) as well as extensive material from the prosecution and the defense. Particularly unique are the indictment documents, which alone comprise 950,000 sheets in various series (NG, NI, NO, NOKW, PS, and smaller document series). In addition, there are around 40 estates/deposits from the former defense attorneys, some of which also contain extensive material on the Dachau trials, in particular on “lynchings” of Allied airmen and concentration camp crimes.
In a first step, the documents from the Nuremberg war crimes trials will be digitized by the Bavarian State Archives between 2025 and 2026 and, as far as legally possible, made available online via the Bavarian State Archives' finding aid database. In order to make them available online, the existing cataloging data must be revised in accordance with uniform standards. In the next stage of the project, the digitized material and metadata will serve as a starting point for FAU to use artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to tag the material and add legal and historical commentary, which will be made available to the interested public on a separate website and through interactive visualizations. This will reveal complex relationships between actors, evidence, and legal concepts.