The New York City Holocaust Commission was presented last Friday with its first major acquisition, 140 crates and footlockers full of historic documents from the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals.
The documents, presented to the Commission from the New York State Library, are one of a set of 23 original mimeographed sets of the proceedings shipped after the trials concluded to libraries and universities in the U.S., via the Library of Congress Documents Expediting Service, according to the Library of Congress expert John Mendelsohn.
The set, presented to the Commission, was sent to the New York City Public Library. In 1957, the City Library forwarded the documents to the State Library in Albany, where they have remained in storage and uncatalogued.
The official ceremony marking the transfer of the documents was held at the Manhattan Supreme Court Building where there was on exhibit a representative display of ten of the original containers holding the documents.
‘TREMENDOUS’ STORAGE JOB AHEAD
The documents “were not packed in any specific order,” Telford Taylor, former chief prosecutor for the U.S. Military Tribunals at Nuremberg, told the some 100 guests attending Friday’s ceremonies. He added that the Commission has a “tremendous job in store for them.”
The Commission plans to catalogue, deacidify and make available to scholars the contents of the 140 crates. The New York City Holocaust Commission has been provided with the old United States Customs Building in lower Manhattan to open a museum and memorial to the Holocaust.
An official letter transmitting the documents from the State Library to the Holocaust Commission was presented to Robert Morgenthau and George Klein, co-chairman of the New York City Holocaust Memorial Commission, by Robert Maurer, executive deputy commissioner of the New York State Department of Education, and State Senate Minority Leader Manfred Ohrenstein.
TRIAL CALLED ‘FIRST HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL’
In his capacities as chairman of the board of the New York State Holocaust Resource Center and Exhibit, and as an associate chairman of the City Commission, Ohrenstein was instrumental in the State Education Department’s decision to present the documents to the Commission.
Ohrenstein, describing the Nuremberg Tribunal as “the first Holocaust memorial,” declared, “The collective conscience of the civilized world determined that the unspeakable acts that had been committed had to be remembered and brought to the bar of justice.”
As early as 1941, the punishment of war crimes became a principal allied war aim. In the Moscow Declaration of November 1, 1943, the U.S., Great Britain and the USSR stated that at the conclusion of the war, the German officers, men, and Nazi Party members allegedly responsible for the atrocities, massacres and executions of World War II would be returned to the countries of their crimes for trial. An international military tribunal was established to try the major Axis war criminals whose offenses were not confined to particular locations.
All but the first of the sessions of this international trial were held in Nuremberg beginning on November 20, 1945. That trial lasted for more than 10 months and was conducted in four languages. Twelve other trials of major war criminals were held under U.S. auspices at Nuremberg and called the “subsequent proceedings.” The majority of this collection of war crimes trials records pertain to those 12 trials that ended in 1949.
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