Harvard Law School is seeking funding for a stalled project that aims, for the first time, to make more than one million pages of documents from the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals available on the internet.
The massive project, which the school’s librarian Harry Martin says could take 10 years and cost up to $7-million, has been on hold since June when the money ran out.
Holocaust historians have hailed the project for trying to preserve and widen public access to one of the most important extant archives documenting the Nazi attempt to wipe out European Jewry.
So far, Martin and his staff have posted about 7 000 pages on their website — www.nuremberg.law.harvard.edu — a volume that covers only one third of the first of the 13 trials held in Nuremberg between 1946-49.
”Every generation needs to learn the lessons of history for themselves, hopefully without repeating them,” Martin said.
”Like many other people, I have a certain knowledge of the Holocaust, but when you read some of these documents it does make it much more immediate,” he added.
Harvard was one of several law schools that received copies of the vast Nuremberg archive, which not only includes documents entered as evidence at the trials but also reams of supplementary material gathered from Nazi administrative offices across post-war Europe.
The 1,03-million pages have been accessible to the public for 50 years, but Martin estimates that only ”handfuls” of people — ranging from scholars to federal US Nazi hunters — have braved the challenge of sifting through the mountains of non-indexed material.
Documents relating to the initial trial of the Nazi leadership are readily available, but those relating to the trials of other groups and individuals for medical experimentation on humans, torture of POWs, use of slave labour and mass murder of civilians have been harder to find.
The storage facility at Harvard was hardly conducive to study, with researchers being locked into a non-air conditioned basement, with water pipes running overhead and dim, naked light bulbs for illumination.
”I remember letting one guy out at the time he requested, only to have him dash past me and down the corridor,” Martin said. ”He’d forgotten to use the men’s room before I locked him in and he’d been dancing around the storage room for several hours.”
The original motivation behind the idea to create a permanent website was simply preservation.
After more than 50 years, the paper documents were becoming increasingly fragile and unstable, and it was decided six years ago to have them digitally preserved and posted on the internet.
Martin and his eight-member team also took on the task of indexing the entire archive — a process that has so far seen four trials completed.
Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory said the Harvard Law project was ”exceptionally important” for the future of Holocaust studies.
”This will not only facilitate research for those already interested, but it might also encourage others to look at the material closely and I think that’s only for the good,” Lipstadt said in a telephone interview.
”You don’t need to Hollywoodise or dramatise the Holocaust, or to add background music. You have these documents … and they are all the more chilling and disturbing because of their factual nature.”
Peter Black, a senior historian at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, pointed out that the internet publication of the documents was not expected to turn up any new material.
”But obviously what will be new is the ability — not just of scholars but also lay people, moviemakers or whatever — to call on this stuff and make judgements for themselves,” Black said.
”In that sense it’s a wonderful and supremely important resource,” he added.
Although Harvard Law has had a Nuremburg website of sorts running for several years, the latest version with accompanying index and search engine was formally launched last week — partly, Martin acknowledged, as a fund-raising gesture.
”For the moment, we are pretty much on hold,” he said. ”And as to when we might complete the project is really a question of how much money we can get and how quickly we can get it.” – Sapa-AFP