Taube Archive of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, 1945-46

Summary

Creator:: International Military Tribunal and International Court of Justice. Library
Extent:: 9920 item(s)
Language:: English

Background

Scope and Content:

The Taube Archive of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, 1945-46 collection includes court transcripts, indictments, sentences, briefings, minutes, etc, related to the proceedings of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg. The first twenty-eight boxes contain: a) Exhibits submitted to the Tribunal by Prosecution and Defense; b) Official Transcripts as taken by Court Reporters, of Court and Commission proceedings; c) Document Books of Prosecution and Defense; d) Trial Briefs, Opening and Closing Statements of Prosecution; e) Final Pleas and Clemency Pleas of Defense; f) Indictment; g) Judgement, Dissenting Opinion and Sentences; h) Minutes of Tribunal Meetings; i) Rules of the Tribunal, Orders of the Tribunal, Court Rulings on the Final Record; and j) Lists, indices and miscellaneous related material. Material was inventoried box by box. The last nine boxes contain only electronic transcriptions of the proceedings before the International Military Tribunal.

The digital collection contains approximately 250,000 pages of digitized paper documents (transcripts of the hearings in English, French, German and Russian; written pleadings; evidence exhibits filed by the prosecution and the defense; documents of the Committee for the Investigation and Prosecution of Major War Criminals; the judgment).

The official archives of the International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg (the "Nuremberg Trial Archives") were entrusted to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 1950. The ICJ and its Registry are the custodians of the entire archive, which includes the original print documents that are available in digital form here, audio recordings of the trial's proceedings, and evidentiary films.

Source: The Registry, International Court of Justice. (2018). Nuremberg Trial Archives, The International Court of Justice: Custodian of the archives of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (2nd ed.) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

International Military Tribunal (IMT) Cases

The IMT's single case tried 24 defendants, all charged with being "leaders, organizers [and] instigators [of] and accomplices" in the crimes defined in the Charter. They were chosen to represent a cross-section of Nazi diplomatic, economic, political, and military leadership. Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels could not be tried because they committed suicide at the end of the war or soon afterwards. Hermann Göring was the highest ranking Nazi official among the defendants.

In the end, only 21 defendants appeared in court. German industrialist Gustav Krupp was included in the original indictment, but he was elderly and in failing health. The Tribunal decided in preliminary hearings to exclude him from the proceedings. Nazi Party secretary Martin Bormann could not be located. Borman was thus tried in absentia. Head of the German Labor Front Robert Ley committed suicide on the eve of the trial. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Joining the lead defendant, Reichsmarschall and Successor Designate to Hitler, Hermann Wilhelm Göring, were:

Rudolf Hess, former Deputy to the Führer
Joachim von Ribbentrop, Reich Minister for Foreign Affairs
Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the High Command of the German Armed Forces
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Head of the Reich Main Security Office and highest ranking officer of the Nazi party Schutzstaffel (SS) at Nuremberg
Alfred Rosenberg, racial theory ideologist and Reich Minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories
Hans Frank, Governor General of the Occupied Polish Territories
Wilhelm Frick, Reich Minister of the Interior and Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia
Julius Streicher, Editor-in-Chief of the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer
Walther Funk, Reich Minister of Economics and President of the German Reichsbank
Hjalmar Schacht, former Reich Minister of Economics and President of the German Reichsbank
Karl Doenitz, Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy and, briefly, successor to Hitler as Head of the German Government
Erich Raeder, former Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy
Baldur von Schirach, Head of the Hitler Youth
Fritz Sauckel, Plenipotentiary of the Nazi slave-labour programme
Alfred Jodl, Chief of the High Command of the German Armed Forces Operations Department
Franz von Papen, former Reich Chancellor and Vice Chancellor
Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reich Commissar for the Occupied Netherlands
Albert Speer, Reich Minister for Armament and Munitions and Hitler's chief architect
Konstantin von Neurath, Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs and later Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia
Hans Fritzsche, Ministerialdirektor of the Reich Ministry of Propaganda

International Military Tribunal (IMT) Crimes

(a) Crimes against peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;

(b) War crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labour or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;

(c) Crimes against humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

The first of these charges, (a), was subdivided in the indictment, which thus contained four counts, of which the defendants each faced his own permutation.

Count one (common plan or conspiracy) was prosecuted by the United States, and count two (crimes against peace) by the United Kingdom. Count three (war crimes) and count four (crimes against humanity) were prosecuted jointly by France and the Soviet Union, according to whether the crimes in question had been committed in Western or Eastern Europe.

Rules or conventions:

Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Indexed terms

Subjects:: Nuremberg War Crime Trials, Nuremberg, Germany, 1946-1949
International criminal courts
Trials (Crimes against humanity)
Criminal procedure (International law)
Crimes against humanity (International law)
Names:: International Court of Justice. Library
Places:: Zeppelinfeld (Nuremberg, Germany)

Access and use

Restrictions:

Materials in the Nuremberg Trial Archives are made available for online viewing courtesy of the International Court of Justice for non-commercial, personal, research and/or study/educational purposes.

All requests for usage beyond online viewing of the Nuremberg Trial Archives should be directed to the Library of the Court, library@icj-cij.org

Terms of Access:

Location of this collection:: International Court of Justice

Peace Palace

Carnegieplein 2

2517 KJ The Hague, The Netherlands
Contact:: +31 70 302 23 23

library@icj-cij.org
Digital collection stewarded by:: Stanford University Libraries and Center for Human Rights and International Justice

Collection