Audio recordings of the Nuremberg trials have been transferred to the Shoah Memorial in Paris as part of an initiative to make them publicly available for the first time.
The archives — made up of 2,000 large gramophone records containing 750 hours of hearings from the post-war trial of 24 Nazis — were handed over by the Hague International Court of Justice at a ceremony on Thursday.
The archive also includes the video evidence that was presented in court.
Nicole Belloubet, France’s justice minister, said: “The Nuremberg trials were a historic first. They informed the world of what exactly happened in the Holocaust.”
She continued: “These archives include films showing the Shoah that were turned into evidence. It shows the liberation of death camps.
“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.”
The archives, once delicate and difficult to access, have now been digitised and will be accessible to everyone both in the Paris Shoah Memorial and in the Washington Holocaust museum.
The transfer of files itself was symbolised by a USB stick handed over to Eric de Rothschild, the chairman of the Paris memorial, by ICT judge Antonio Augusto Cancado Trindade.
“Sorry this is so unimpressive. We don’t have whole boxes of old files to show you,” Mr Rothschild said, before accidentally dropping the device on the floor.
“We used to have access to short bits of the trial, now we have the full version of all hearings,” Jacques Fredj, the memorial’s director, told the JC.
It was historian and lawyer Serge Klarsfeld who discovered the the discs’ existence in the 1980s. He was gathering evidence for the trial of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in Lyon who fled to Bolivia after the war and eventually returned in 1983.
Mr Klarsfeld has worked to have the archives preserved ever since: “Nobody really cared about Second World War archives at the time and preserving documents takes a lot of energy and money.
“It was also very complicated because the law required us to get authorisations from all four powers and from the UN.”
Access was finally granted in 2014.
“It’s all a matter of funding really,” Mr Fredj said.
“The memorial and the museum in Washington gathered funding [because] the International Court did not have a budget for this.”
These archives are now safe thanks to a modern digitalisation technique but Mr Klarsfeld says a bigger archive is still at risk in the US.
“Thousands of discs with Nazi officials’ interrogations are recorded on discs in a storage room in Washington,” he said.
“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.”
