Japanese Army General Yamashita during his trial by an American military tribunal.
Origins of the Archive
Handa Center Director David Cohen originally established the War Crimes Studies Center (WCSC) to support his work collecting and analyzing a vast body of generally overlooked post-World War II war crimes trial records scattered across Europe, East Asia, and the South Pacific. At the time he began this research, most people had heard of the proceedings at the International Military Tribunal for Nuremberg, but few in the academic or legal community knew much, if anything, about the vast body of WWII-era international legal precedent from national war crimes programs that Cohen was studying.
With the support of the Volkswagen Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, the Wang Family Foundation, and the University of California at Berkeley, the WCSC began collecting and negotiating access to trial records from across the European and Pacific theater countries in which WWII was fought.
Current Holdings
To date, Cohen and his staff, along with teams of graduate student researchers and undergraduate interns, have collected thousands of previously inaccessible (and sometimes classified) war crimes trial records from WWII proceedings conducted by China, the Netherlands, Italy, Great Britain, France, Australia, the United States, and the Philippines.
