Document Analyst's Report

Like all Gaul (if we remember our Latin), July was divided into three parts. Having finished the documents of the individual defendants in June, I skimmed through the trial transcript for July 1946, checking the introduction of prosecution and defense documents that were submitted in the intervals between the defense attorneys’ final pleas for their clients (which I had already analyzed); these documents were already in the system but I added many transcript citations and some new information provided when the documents were entered. Second, I reviewed the box-and-folder list for files that were apparent duplicates or that held documents that did not get covered during the previous stages of the work, mainly because they were out of proper place in the collection, like stray sheep. The apparent duplicates were confirmed as real duplicates and needed no further work, while the stray documents were valuable. Third, I began work on the documents of the last major section of the trial, the defense cases of the (alleged) criminal organizations, beginning with the list of relevant files and the long report of the IMT commission tasked with reviewing potential evidence for the organizations’ defense cases.

Filling a gap: After the defendants’ final pleas, I added the closing arguments by the American and British prosecutors against the defendants. We don’t have English-language versions of the French and Soviet prosecution closing arguments, but one of the stray documents was an English-language text of the French opening argument (in a box far removed from the French set), and that fits in the sequence reasonably well. One good element in the French argument is a review of the criminal organizations, which points to the material that will follow.

Closing a circle: Twenty years ago, in the project’s first phase, I found that the boxes for the first NMT trials we worked on did not have all the files they were supposed to have, and also held files that did not belong there (e.g., documents from the Tokyo trials, and HLS faculty papers), so I did a very quick review of all the ca. 690 boxes in the collection (plus the Tokyo set) to sort out what was where. When I got to box 461, in addition to set of miscellaneous files I found a handful of photostat documents and photographs; I put them in a folder, labeled it “Misc.,” and back in the box. This time I was able to make sense of them as documents that lacked the usual mimeo texts but were real IMT prosecution exhibits. Some were essentially bureaucratic, establishing that one defendant (Funk) was linked to the forced labor program. The photographs were more striking, featuring Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the head of the SS police forces. Kaltenbrunner’s defense was that he had been an intelligence officer while Himmler kept control of “executive” operations, but the photographs showed Kaltenbrunner at Himmler’s side inspecting a concentration camp, an extremely executive operation.

The final stray document that I added was a photograph of the defendants in their box in the courtroom in 1946.

A round number: We now have just over 6000 analyzed documents for the IMT in the database.

Matt Seccombe, 2 August 2024