Digitisation and historical research of the RSHA trials

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Uwe Schaper; Professor Dr. Michael Wildt
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 423322868

With 37 preliminary proceedings against 1,200 defendants, the planned trials against members of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the "core group of genocide" (Ulrich Herbert), would have become by far the largest Nazi trial complex in post-war Germany. The preliminary proceedings, on the other hand, which were legally brought down by a marginal law, contain a wealth of extraordinarily informative documents for historical research, both for dealing with the National Socialist extermination policy and for dealing with the Holocaust under criminal law. In a double application, these documents, which are kept in the Berlin State Archives, are to be digitised and thus made accessible to the academic and social public, and for the first time are to be comprehensively evaluated scholarly. The questions are about the investigators, prosecutors and criminal investigators, as the central actors, about the historical and legal horizon of the investigations as an indicator for the contemporary state of knowledge, ways of dealing with and societal controversies about National Socialism, about the interdependencies of the RSHA proceedings with the Federal Republic's criminal prosecution practice of Nazi violent crimes in the 1960s and finally about the lasting influence of the public discussion and criminal punishment of Nazi crimes by the RSHA proceedings.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants