Main Content

Tasks of the Research Centre

The knowledge that there was a large number of war crimes trials around the world was the impetus in 1998 for an application for support from the Volkswagen Foundation for the realization of a pilot project on war crimes trials against the Germans and Japanese following WWII. The application was made by Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Dieter Simon (former head of the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt am Main) in cooperation with the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California (Berkeley). The project had two main aims: the collection, if possible, of all relevant documents and to systematically consider inter alia collective, individual, moral and legal responsibility using the example of war crimes trials following WWII. The Volkswagen Foundation accepted the application in July 1999 and provided means for a period of three years.

The applicants indicated that a project of that scope could only be realized gradually. As a result, it was impossible to include every trial from all of the countries within the frame of the pilot project. The project leaders then decided on target countries of Australia, Great Britain and the United States due to similarities in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of preparing materials. In order to include the continental European region, three more countries were included in the study: France, Italy, and the Netherlands. Three complexes of questions underpinned the investigations:

• Where are the documents; what condition are they in; and how many war crimes trials took place?
• Under which conditions can the volumes be accessed?
• Could reproductions be made; and if so in which form is there the will to work (also in future)
  with an international research and documentation centre?

In 2002 the work of the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History was largely finished. At the beginning of the following year there were negotiations aimed at establishing a war crimes research and documentation centre at Philipps-Universität Marburg. It only took a few months for the ambitious plan to be realized. On July 7th, 2003, representatives of the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History, the Volkswagen Foundation, the U.C. Berkeley War Crimes Studies Centre, and Philipps-Universität Marburg ratified an acquisition agreement. The university pledged to permanently support the, soon-to- be-founded, research and documentation centre. In return, all of the relevant documents, which had been collected, were to be brought to Marburg. Between 1998 and 2001 around 400 film reels with about 350,000 pages were acquired. Today, they are in Marburg.