Document Analyst's Report

During June and July I completed the analysis of the documents of the IMT and began work on one of the last American trials, NMT 11 (1947-49), which covered governmental and economic officials one or two levels below the top leaders who had been charged in the IMT.

Odds, ends, and oversize: For the last set of IMT documents, the defense case of the criminal organizations, only a few were left to be analyzed. After those, I looked at things that had fallen outside the general scheme of IMT material, or that had been out of reach. One group was a set of maritime charts relating to submarine warfare that fell outside the project’s agenda of English-language trial documents because the text was in German. I considered that since the documents were placed in an English-language set, that no translation had probably been made, and also that the charts could be understood without reading the text. And if the documents were not added now, they never would be. I put them in. Another group was odder: a folder of miscellaneous documents, mostly in German, with the label “SS?” Because of the label, the folder had been placed with SS material. I put them in with a statement in the Notes field indicating their tenuous relevance to the trial.

When the documents in the collection were scanned to produce high-quality images, some documents were removed if they were too fragile or too big to be kept in the ordinary boxes; these were moved to 24 oversize boxes in Special Collections. I asked to go through them, partly in order to make a complete list of every folder in every box, with some details about what was in them and which part of the collection they came from. The more urgent task was to locate all the IMT documents in the boxes and see whether they had already been analyzed earlier or needed to go in now. Only five needed to be analyzed; all the rest were already covered. With that done, I declared the IMT work completed, with 7029 documents analyzed.

NMT 11: The trial documents and trial transcript are the most voluminous of any of the Nuremberg trials, and while 80% of the document boxes were well organized, 20% were a mess. Reviewing the latter was my first task, and I was able to make a full record of the material. One surprise came from the four versions of the indictment: the first two were separate indictments for two different trials, one of them against officials of the Foreign Ministry and one against officials of the economic ministries and agencies. The third indictment combined the two as the Ministries Case, and the final indictment refined the charges and the list of defendants.

Compared to the IMT, NMT 11 seems to have been more decorous. The prosecution was very concerned about securing the historical record—hence the abundant documentation—and less about severe punishment. None of the convicted defendants received a death sentence. The tribunal showed some personal courtesies: one defendant was given a leave from the trial in order to get married, and one who was very ill had his sentence reduced to time served so that he could die outside of prison. But the issues were hard fought. The defense attorneys challenged both the legitimacy and the basic rules of the tribunal (unsuccessfully), and the prosecution characterized the defendants’ crimes under three headings: aggression, slave labor, and genocide.

Matt Seccombe, 5 August 2025