To individual researchers we offer the following services:
1. Trial cases
a) Search of a case against a specific defendant, which cannot be
found on the website.
There may be several reasons for this:
- due to privacy regulations, many of the names of defendants have been
abbreviated. This may also hold true for the defendant you're looking for
- the particular case you're looking for did not result in a judgment (only
cases that ended with a judgment are listed in the website overview).
Again there may be several grounds for this:
* the State Prosecutor may have terminated the case (i.e. there was no
trial),
* the court may have terminated the proceedings
* the defendant was discharged before the case came to court
- the case you're looking for did not involve fatalities (only cases
dealing with NS-crimes that resulted in the death of at least one of the
victims are listed in the website overview)
b) Search of a particular group of trial cases, for example:
- all West German cases before the year 1960, dealing with the
extermination of the Jews by members of the German Wehrmacht,
or
- all cases, in which female defendants were acquitted of charges involving
their participation in the so-called 'Euthanasia'- program,
or
all cases tried in the former French occupational zone between 1945 and
1952, concerning a particular criminal complex (e.g. crimes against
humanity)
Etc.
In many of these instances the Amsterdam trial case digital data base may be of
assistance. It not only contains the (full) names of defendants, whose
trial ended with a court judgment, but also includes information on a great
many cases, which did not result in a final judgment (generally because the
State Prosecutor suspended them).
2. Trial judgments
The judgments published in the East and West German JuNSV series
currently comprise an approximate 40,000 pages. Due to privacy regulations,
the names of the participants in the various trial proceedings (defendants,
witnesses, prosecution officials, defence counsel, judges) are generally
anonymized in this published material. Both the size of the material and the
anonymizations are a handicap for systematic research.
The Amsterdam judgment digital data base may be helpful in this respect as
it contains all the material - published and (still) unpublished - including all
names of the trial participants (in full) and in a format
which allows for full text retrieval of any given search term(s), such as
persons, legal concepts, geographical locations, specific agencies or units,
and so on. Through a combination of search terms even more complicated
questions can be "fished out" of the material. Here are some randomly chosen
examples:
- all court references to the role of the state secretary in the
German Foreign Office, Ernst v. Weizsäcker in relation to the persecution of
the Jews
or
- court evaluations of the perceptive abilities of material witnesses under
extreme circumstances
or
- the perspectives on the administration of justice by the Volksgerichtshof
by West German courts over the years
3. Press archive
Next to the digital data bases, there is an extensive collection of
German newspaper and magazine clippings relating to the prosecution and
trials of Nazi crimes, from 1963 onwards. It too contains much information
on a wide variety of subjects relating to these themes.
Where to direct your research questions?
The appropriate address to send your questions to is EX POST
FACTO, the research bureau which may help you
with the answers you're looking for.
For more information, please consult
www.expostfacto.nl or mail directly to:
junsv@expostfacto.nl.