The online publication of important documents from a Cornell Law Library collection related to war-crimes trials of Nazis is attracting national attention.
The web site, where a small sample of the thousands of documents amassed by U.S. Army Gen. William Donovan can be found, is accessible at: www.lawschool.cornell.edu/library/nuremberg. The online publishing event of documents from Donovan's collection was written up in the New York Times News of the Week in Review section, Jan. 13, and also appeared in an Associated Press wire story Jan. 10.
Donovan compiled 148 volumes of personal papers, photographs and other documents, including complete transcripts of the Nuremberg trials translated into English, when he served as special assistant to the U.S. chief prosecutor of the International Military Tribunal, which prosecuted Nazi war crimes following World War II in Nuremberg, Germany. He also founded and directed the first U.S. intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), which assisted the tribunal. Donovan went on to become a partner in a New York City law firm and stored the collection in his law offices until the 1990s, when the firm broke up. The documents were then purchased by Henry and Ellen Schaum Korn, both Cornell Class of '68 graduates, who gave them to the Cornell Law Library in 1998 to enhance its extensive human rights collection (see www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Oct98/nuremberg.transcripts.korn.html ).
The Donovan Nuremberg online project focuses exclusively on those documents related to law and religion. The project is a joint one between Cornell Law School's library and the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion, a student-produced law journal at Rutgers University. The first installment, which went up this January, is an O.S.S. document outlining the Nazi plan to neutralize German Christian churches, which were viewed as fundamentally opposed to Hitler's National Socialist Party's agenda of racism, world domination and subservience of the church to the state. The site also offers scholarly commentary by Michael Salter, a professor of law at the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, and Claire Hulme, a doctoral student there.
"At a time when war crimes tribunals are actively being discussed, it is very exciting to make available new primary evidence on the first such tribunal to enhance both the historical and current perspectives," said Claire Germain, the Edward Cornell Law Librarian and professor of law at Cornell. "Our mission in the library is to preserve and disseminate information for the benefit of future generations of scholars. Seeing new historical and legal insights develop from students and established scholars via the Internet is very gratifying."
Germain worked with Rutgers law students to identify and digitize key materials. The students then edited them for the web site, which is housed on a server at Rutgers, with links to the Cornell Law School's library web pages.
Making the entire contents of the law library's Nuremberg collection more widely known to scholars around the world is the next challenge, said Germain. To that end, the library hired John Lauricella (Cornell Ph.D., English, 1993) to create an index offering detailed descriptions of the collection's contents. The index currently is being converted to a format responsive to electronic searches of all kinds, including names of places, subjects and trial witnesses as well as authors of particular documents. And to ensure the collection will be preserved for future scholars, Germain and colleagues at the law library are reprinting on acid-free paper those materials that are falling apart.
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