Devils in the details
German doctors killed Anna Weiss as part of a Nazi euthanasia program directed at individuals they classified as disabled. The woman’s so-called disability, as recorded in trial documents: being an “unsympathetic Czech Talmudic Jewess.” “That ‘unsympathetic’ woman deserved to be named,” said Matt Seccombe, who has been the primary analyst for Harvard Law School Library’s Nuremberg Trials Project. “In these mass atrocities, the names become numbers. They deserve to have their names recorded and remembered.” In 1949, four years after the Nuremberg war crime trials began, the library received the most complete set of documents from the Nazi prosecutions outside that of the National Archives. Over the years, individuals who participated in the 13 trials have also donated their personal papers related to the cases. In 1998, the library initiated the Nuremberg Trials Project with the goals of preserving the entire collection and making it accessible online. To date, Seccombe has analyzed five...