German efficiency was the defendants' undoing in the sense that so much documentation had been produced and saved that the verdicts were considered by most observers to be a foregone conclusion. Though the Nazis made efforts at the end of the war to destroy records and blow up entire installations, such as the concentrations camps, a remarkable amount of material survived the war and was collected from all over Germany and the territories it had occupied. One of the difficult aspects of preparing for a trial was the need to collect, collate, and analyze thousands of documents in a relatively short period of time. This was also especially important because of the Nuremberg prosecutors' decision to base their case almost entirely on these documents rather than on the testimony of witnesses.

In addition to helping to establish the defendants' guilt, the documentary record...