Harvard Law School is planning to put more than a million documents from the Nuremberg trials on the internet, allowing ready access to records of the historic proceedings that probed the war crimes of Hitler's Third Reich.
The multimillion-dollar project, whose initial phase is already complete, is the most ambitious effort to date to post Nuremberg trial documents on the internet, said Harry Martin, a Harvard Law professor and head librarian at the Cambridge-based school.
More than 6,700 pages of material from one of the trials, known as the 'medical case' or the 'doctors' trial', which involved 23 defendants accused of doing harmful or fatal medical experiments on humans, have already been posted, Mr Martin said.
The library was originally just looking for a way to preserve the documents, which have begun to deteriorate with age, and considered putting them on microfilm, but felt they would be more accessible on the internet, he said.
He said the materials would be useful to legal scholars but they also provide a stark reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust.
"I think there is a tendency in some parts to want to put that behind us, to forget about it, to say it didn't happen. If you see the documents themselves, it's harder to say that," he said.
Professor George Annas, an expert on medical ethics from Boston University School of Public Health who once sifted through the documents while researching a book, welcomed the project. He called it a "terrific service to the scholarly community and the advocacy groups".
"It's an important resource, particularly for those who question whether the Holocaust really happened," said Steven Freeman, associate director of civil rights for the Anti-Defamation League in New York. "It documents many of the worst atrocities and offers the historical record in a way that is accessible to scholars and interested parties around the world."
Some of the documents that will be posted have been readily available at universities, at the National Archives, and scattered on some websites, experts and academics said. But other documents have been harder to find, unseen by all but the most intent scholars.
Peter Black, senior historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, said he hadn't heard of such a project before and it appeared that the Harvard Law plan "offers a large number of unpublished documents in a format that might not have been previously available."
Susan Cooper, a spokeswoman for the National Archives, said the Harvard project would be a "huge achievement".
Mr Martin said the scope of the Harvard effort to bring the documents out of their musty basement boxes and into cyberspace was unprecedented.
He said the school, which began the project with a $100,000 (£62,000) grant from an alumnus, is looking for additional funding to post the rest of the collection, which totals 690 boxes of documents, with an estimated 1,035,000 pages of text. The project could ultimately cost $7 million to $8 million, he estimated.
The documents to be posted include trial transcripts, briefs, document books, and evidence files. The files include records from both the International Military Tribunal, in which military and political leaders of Nazi Germany were tried, and the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals, which focused on other accused war criminals. The trials opened in late 1945 and continued until 1949.
