Trial of the Major War Criminals before the
International Military Tribunal
The Holocaust History Project has been, since its inception,
transcribing a free, public copy of the Trial of the Major War
Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, commonly
known as the "blue series."
These volumes contain a complete transcript of everything said at
the postwar Nuremberg Trial, where the leaders of the Nazi regime were
tried, acquitted or convicted, and sentenced.
The charges were conspiracy against peace, crimes against peace, war
crimes, and crimes against humanity. For more information on the trial
itself, please see our short essay
The Nuremberg Trial.
The trial took fully a year and many thousands of documents were
introduced into evidence. As a result, the series is enormous: the photo
on the right shows only two-thirds of the collection. We will surely be
spending many more years making this information available.
We feel it is important to do this for several reasons. The books are
long out of print, difficult to find, and extremely expensive. Many
university libraries have a copy in their collection; many do not. We
feel that it is crucial to bring this information to as many people as
possible, for the study of this momentous event in 1945 and 1946.
The following volumes are available in their entirety:
- Volume I
- Including Indictment, Judgment, and Sentences. 370 pp.
- Volume II
- Covering 1945 November 14 to November 30. 500 pp.
- Volume III
- Covering 1945 December 1 to December 14. 600 pp.
- Volume IV
- Covering 1945 December 17 to 1946 January 8. 570 pp.
It is entirely thanks to the work of Holocaust History Project
volunteers
Harry Mazal
and Patrick Groff that this project progresses.
Other electronic reproductions of these works exist. We know of two.
Yale Law Library's
Avalon Project
is transcribing these works as well, and has been very productive. One
difference is that they do not seem to intend to provide
page images,
nor to show the individual pages, but are separating the text into
sections. In an age where Holocaust-deniers refuse to accept any
quotations with which they disagree, we feel it is important to offer
scanned images of each page as well as their text (and we are working on
catching up our scanned format with our textual format). Also, keeping
pages separate makes these reference works easy to cite. (We are also
looking into the possibility of providing a section-view that will show
many pages at once.)
The second electronic production will remain nameless here; it is
sold on CD-ROM and includes so many errors and omissions as to be
worthless for serious study.
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