The Harvard Law School Library has approximately one million pages of documents relating to the trial of military and political leaders of Nazi Germany before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and to the twelve trials of other accused war criminals before the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT).

The documents, which include trial transcripts, briefs, document books, evidence files, and other papers, have been studied by lawyers, scholars, and other researchers in the areas of history, ethics, genocide, and war crimes, and are of particular interest to officials and students of current international tribunals involving war crimes and crimes against humanity.

To preserve the contents of these documents--which are now too fragile to be handled--and to provide expanded access to this material, the Library is undertaking a multi-stage digitization project. The Nuremberg Trials Project is an open-access initiative to create and present digitized images or full-text versions of the Library's Nuremberg documents, descriptions of each document, and general information about the trials.

Launched in 2003 at the completion of the first stage of digitization, the Nuremberg Trials Project presented documents from and relating to the Medical Case, which was Case 1 of the NMT trials. The Medical Case (U.S.A. v. Karl Brandt et al., also known as the Doctors' Trial) was held in 1946-1947 and involved 23 defendants accused of organizing and participating in war crimes and crimes against humanity in the form of harmful or fatal medical experiments and other medical procedures inflicted on both civilians and prisoners of war.

The HLS Library managed a second phase of the project in 2004-2005 to transcribe and edit the NMT 1 transcript, and in the late spring of 2011 completed a third stage by digitizing all of the documents from and relating to Cases 2 and 4 of the NMT trials.

NMT 2 (U.S.A. v. Erhard Milch) took place in 1946-1947. Milch was indicted on counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The prosecution presented 161 written exhibits and 3 witnesses. The defense presented 51 written exhibits, 30 witnesses, and testimony by Milch himself. NMT 4 (U.S.A. v. Pohl et al.) took place in 1947. Chief of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (Wirtschafts und Verwaltungshauptant, WVHA), Oswald Pohl and seventeen other WVHA official were charged with conspiracy to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership in a criminal organization. The crimes occurred between 1942 and 1945 in WVHA-managed concentration camps and labor camps of the SS, where up to 10,000,000 individuals were imprisoned.