Nuremberg Trial Archives to be Centralized at Stanford University, Digital Archive Under Development

From the Times of Israel:

The complete archives of the seminal Nuremberg war crimes trial will be housed in a new center at Stanford University in California.

Known as the Taube Archive of the International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg, it will manage the long-term digital preservation of documents, transcripts, photographs, films and audio recordings from this historic postwar trial in Germany which brought a group of Nazi leaders to justice.

Stanford was authorized to create the project by the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Stanford Libraries will develop the collection to provide a multimedia and educational resource for scholars, students and the public.

At present, materials from the trial are scattered in the holdings of many universities and are thus not easily accessible, Michael Keller, Stanford’s vice-provost and university librarian, said in an interview.

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Improving access and preservation of records from international war tribunals has been an ongoing effort between Stanford Libraries and the Stanford Center for Human Rights and International Justice. In 2018, Stanford launched the Virtual Tribunals Digital Collection making records from 105 cases investigated by the Special Panel for Serious Crimes in East Timor widely accessible. “The Taube IMT Archive program is a groundbreaking expansion of this initial pilot effort, which has been designed to enable cutting edge cross-tribunal research in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide,” said Cohen.

While selected materials from the IMT are already available online, Michael Keller, vice provost and university librarian at Stanford, notes, “they are scattered in the holdings of many institutions, which makes access difficult, and they do not include important scholarly functions, such as comparison of documents, annotation of pages and images of trial proceedings, links to related websites, and sharing of scholarly annotations. This program would not have been possible without the significant support of Tad Taube and Shana Penn of the Taube Philanthropies.”

“The Nuremberg digital archive site we are developing will present the original, unpublished, and complete official record of the IMT Trial,” said Keller. Academic use of the digital IMT Archive is expected to be robust, but Keller believes, “the truths and principles that it contains will inform broader humanitarian purposes and will combat misinformation, inspire human rights movements, and create trust in justice.”

The Taube IMT Digital Archive project undertaken by the Stanford Libraries will make a significant contribution to the international community’s cooperative efforts to ensure the long-term preservation of the archives. In 2010, the ICJ arranged for the paper documents to be de-acidified and digitized. Over the last several years, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris funded and provided technical advice for the digitization of the film, microfilm, and gramophone disc components of the archives.

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