Documents Show Nazis Planned to Eliminate Christianity
Thursday, January 10, 2002
TRENTON, N.J. — The public was given its first glimpse of rare documents from the Nuremburg trials that helped to convict Nazi war criminals and detail some of their lesser-known schemes.
The first installment of papers, which lay out a Nazi plan to eliminate Christianity and convert followers to an Aryan philosophy, were released on the Web site of the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion.
Researchers believe this collection could offer new insights into the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials.
Additional documents will be posted every six months, along with commentary from legal scholars.
"I definitely think it's information the general public has not had access to," said Julie Seltzer Mandel, editor of the law journal's Nuremberg project. "Up until now, it would have taken a lot of work to get a lot of this information."
The cache includes transcripts in German and English as well as background memoranda and evidentiary analyses of the defendants. Some are marked "top secret."
The documents' journey to Rutgers has taken 50 years.
They were taken from 148 volumes of personal papers and records kept by Gen. William J. Donovan during the trials. Donovan, a leading U.S. investigator at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, supplemented his set of trial-related documents and transcripts with original photos, letters, sketches, handwritten notes and additional evidence.
"The transcription information has been available for many years. It's the supporting documentation that's harder to find," said Betsy Pittman, archivist at the University of Connecticut, which has its own set of Nuremberg papers.
When Donovan left Germany, he took the documents, had them bound in blue leather and installed them in his Manhattan law office, later called Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine.
The collection remained there long after Donovan died in 1959. When the firm closed in 1998, its partners sought a new home for the volumes. One young lawyer at the firm notified Henry H. Korn, who had mentored him in law school.
"They didn't know what to do with the 628 pounds of volumes," said Korn, a lawyer with New York-based Scheichet & Davis. "I said, 'Have you looked at them?' And he said, 'I have, and these are extraordinary."'
Korn paid what he described as a "modest" sum for the documents, and moved them to his office. Then he asked whether his own alma mater, Cornell University, was interested.
"Fifteen minutes was all it took," Korn said. "Cornell said they would take these books."
Since then, legal scholars have visited Cornell's rare books room to flip through the brittle pages. But until now, the Donovan collection has not been widely available, and few know it exists.
A student from the Rutgers University School of Law learned of the collection while interning for Korn in 1999. Soon the two universities had worked out a deal to publish the papers in the Rutgers online law journal.
"I don't like to see books and materials that are inert, just gathering dust," said Claire M. Germain, a Cornell Law librarian and professor.
The project had added significance for Mandel, a third-year law student who has edited Rutgers' Nuremberg project since March. Her 80-year-old grandmother survived the Auschwitz death camp.
"For as long as I can remember, the importance has been on remembrance and making sure the story is told accurately so history won't repeat itself," said Mandel, 29, of Berlin Borough.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
