Nuremberg trials recordings handed over to Holocaust Memorial in Paris
The initiative is part of an effort to make the material available to the public
By ROSSELLA TERCATINTHE DEFENDANTS, including Joachim von Ribbentrop in the front row, sit in the dock at Nuremberg in 1946.(photo credit: REUTERS)
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague handed over hundreds of hours of audio recordings from the Nuremberg trials to the Holocaust memorial in Paris, the Jewish Chronicle of London reported on Friday.The initiative is part of an effort to make the historic material available to the public. The recordings have been digitized and will be accessible both at the Paris memorial and at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.A ceremony marking the official transfer took place at the ICJ on Thursday. Judge Antonio Augusto Cancado Trindade presented a USB drive to the chairman of the Paris memorial, Eric de Rothschild.“Sorry this is so unimpressive,” Trindade commented, according to the Chronicle. “We don’t have whole boxes of old files to show you.”According to the weekly, the discs with the recordings were discovered in the 1980s by Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld. He warned that there is much more to do to preserve materials from the trials.“Thousands of discs with Nazi officials’ interrogations are recorded on discs in a storage room in Washington,” said Klarsfeld. “Preserving them will take a lot of money. They are not easy to access because every time someone listens to the recording, they are slightly damaged.”The Nuremberg International Military Tribunal was established in 1945 in order to prosecute those responsible for Nazi war crimes. The archives of that tribunal, which consist of film footage, written documents, metal disk recordings of the hearings and several exhibits, were entrusted to the ICJ in 1946.The term “Nuremberg trials” refers to two groups of trials: the Major War Criminals Trial (1945-1946) conducted before the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal against 24 senior officials of the Nazi regime, and the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials (1946–1949), which were held before US tribunals against 177 high-ranking officials.“The Nuremberg trials were a historic first,” commented French Justice Minister Nicole Belloubet, the Chronicle reported. “They informed the world of what exactly happened in the Holocaust. In Nuremberg, for the first time in history, the Allied powers responded to barbarity with the law. They put justice above their differences. Nuremberg set the foundation for today’s International Courts of Justice.”
