World War II Collections

History of the World War II Collections

The Center’s Founding Director, David Cohen, originally established the War Crimes Studies Center at the University of California, Berkeley, to support his work collecting and analyzing a vast body of generally overlooked post-World War II war crimes trial records scattered across Europe, East Asia, and the South Pacific. At the time that he began this research, most people had heard of the proceedings at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, but few in the academic or legal communities knew much, if anything, about the vast body of World War II-era international and national war crimes programs that Cohen was studying. 

With the support of the Volkswagen Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, the Wang Family Foundation, and the University of California at Berkeley, the Center began collecting and negotiating access to trial records from the immediate post-war era. Cohen and his staff, along with teams of graduate student researchers and undergraduate interns, collected thousands of previously inaccessible (and sometimes classified) war crimes trial records. Nearly all involved either Japanese and German defendants from the Pacific and European theaters of operation. These trials were conducted by more than twenty countries and the Center's collections grew to include proceedings that took place in China, the Netherlands, Italy, Great Britain, France, Australia, the United States, and the Philippines. National-level programs in some of these countries – particularly Great Britain, Australia, and the Philippines – have permitted some of these records to be digitized and made available to the public. 

The United States conducted by far the largest recognized war crimes trial programs in both Europe and the Pacific. Yet, because the records of the American efforts were classified for many decades and thereafter secured in difficult-to-access archives, vanishingly little research and writing has considered these records. On moving to Stanford, the now-Center for Human Rights and International Justice partnered with Stanford University Libraries to open up the American records to readers and researchers by digitizing and displaying the records for free, forever.  

In most instances, the records that have been released as a result of this partnership have never before been reproduced. Comprehensive in their content, digitized in high detail, and fully searchable, these collections offer tremendous new opportunities both for scholarship and the development of human rights by preserving and highlighting vital historical records. 

Three archives of World War II material are maintained by Virtual Tribunals: the records of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg; the records of the U.S. Army Courts, Europe; and the records of the U.S. Army Courts, Asia-Pacific. A fourth archive, the U.S. Navy Courts, Asia-Pacific, is anticipated in 2026.

Taube Archive of the International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg, 1945-46

In 2021, Stanford University Libraries was authorized by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague to manage the long-term digital preservation and online hosting of the records of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, at which the surviving leadership of Nazi Germany were prosecuted. Perhaps the most important legal proceedings ever undertaken, the work at Nuremberg contributed greatly to the formation of the modern world. The archives for Nuremberg had been entrusted to the ICJ by a decision of the Tribunal in 1946, but had never been adequately accessible to the public. 

Following two years of intense work, the fully digitized Taube Archive of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, 1945-1946 (IMT) launched in 2023 as the result of a true partnership between the Libraries and the Stanford Center for Human Rights and International Justice.

This online archive makes available to the world digitized versions of the original and complete official record of the IMT, both published and unpublished. Unique to the Taube Archive, textual, visual, and audio research can be conducted on a single site, as the records combine recordings of the trial proceedings with courtroom documents and evidentiary films, all rendered browsable and searchable. The technical development work by Stanford Libraries was completed on both the open-source ArcLight and the Stanford Spotlight discovery platforms, which has enhanced accessibility to the IMT materials. The capabilities of full-text search, faceted browsing, multilingual captions, moving image transcriptions, text extraction processing, and a scholarly apparatus for background information have expanded the ways in which users can engage with the historical record.

Funding for the project was provided by Taube Philanthropies, an organization founded in 1981 by Stanford alumnus Tad Taube to support diverse educational, research, cultural, community, and youth organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area, Poland, and Israel. “Of all the grants we’ve made to Stanford over the years, this one to fund the creation of the digital IMT archive may be the most impactful. The horrors of the Holocaust are very personal to me but also very important to humanity,” said Taube, who escaped with his immediate family from Poland in 1939, on the eve of WWII. “People everywhere must have access to study and reflect on the crimes detailed in the trial at Nuremberg so that we can recognize and prevent such atrocities in the future and hold perpetrators accountable when such crimes are committed. We cannot forget.”

World War II U.S. Army Courts, Europe

In this collection, we present the records of the U.S. Army’s prosecution of war criminals from Nazi Germany. Collectively known as the “Dachau Trials,” so named because the Army chose to hold most of the trials on the grounds of the former concentration camp of Dachau, this would be the largest war crimes program ever run by the United States.

The cases of the Dachau Trials provide a historical cutaway into the horrors perpetrated in the name of the Third Reich, ranging from the hell of the concentration camps to the callous murder of prisoners of war. Indeed, a substantial amount of Holocaust records reside in this archive. These records reflect the accumulation of many thousands of first-person accounts by the victims, witnesses, perpetrators, and liberators of Nazi Germany. The stories reveal their lives – and how they intertwined with the deaths of so many others.

The European collection consists of the full pre-trial, trial, and post-trial records of 17 cases heard by the U.S. Army courts. Though they are a small sample of the 489 cases heard by these courts, these trials are among the most historically significant and jurisprudentially valuable of the cases. Alongside those full records, we present the Army’s reviews and recommendations on the outcomes of all 489 cases. These provide a summary overview of each case.

In years to come, Virtual Tribunals will eventually digitize and display the full records of all cases from these historically significant, yet barely studied, trials.

World War II U.S. Army Courts, Asia-Pacific

In the early 2000s, the Center served as the sole repository in North America for over one million microfilmed pages of records of WWII-era trials of Japanese war criminals. Upon moving to Stanford in 2014, the Center deposited these microfilm reels in the archive of the Stanford University Libraries (SUL), and Center and SUL undertook a joint effort to digitize this microfilm and include it in the Virtual Tribunals collection. 

In this collection, we store and showcase the trials conducted by the U.S. Army of war criminals from the Empire of Japan. These proceedings were held in Yokohama and Tokyo in Japan, Manila in the Philippines, and Shanghai in China. Second only to the Dachau Trials in scale, the majority of the Yokohama cases concerned atrocities committed against Allied service personnel or civilians. Manila cases, by contrast, generally focused on atrocities against Filipino civilians. The Tokyo records detail the trials of two senior Japanese leaders who were tried after the completion of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Nearly all victims in these trials suffered deprivation and cruelty at the hands of the Japanese military, in locations across the vast sweep of the Asia-Pacific region. The cases presented here are a judicial chronicle of this pain, providing a richly detailed consideration of Japanese war crimes. These range from medical experiments performed on captured American airmen, to vicious reprisals against Filipino civilians for aiding guerilla fighters, to ceaseless beatings and executions of Allied soldiers used as slave-laborers in prisoner of war camps. 

The Asia-Pacific collection consists of the full trial and post-trial records for 45 cases conducted at Yokohama, 20 cases held at Manila, and two cases at Tokyo. We also present the partial papers of a further 93 cases heard at Yokohama, mostly focusing on the sensitive post-trial and sentencing processes for convicted criminals. Additionally, and greatly strengthening the historical value of this collection, we present the complete record of all 312 reviews and recommendations made on the trials held in Yokohama.

Future Collections

Two exciting projects are underway and will see an appreciable expansion in the size of the Virtual Tribunals collections. First, the European collection will grow in tranches to eventually incorporate the full records of all cases conducted by the U.S. Army. Second, a fourth archive, that of the U.S. Navy’s war crimes program against war criminals from Imperial Japan – which has never been considered by historians – is under development and intended for release in 2026.