Hitler's Nuremberg Laws End Convoluted Journey at National Archives

Adolf Hitler is shown in this circa 1930 file photo.

(Roger Viollet/Getty Images)

Nuremberg Laws Charted Dark Course for Jews

Martin Dannenberg told the Baltimore Sun in a 1999 interview that he saw the discovery as incredibly ironic. "I had the most peculiar feeling when I had this in my hand, that I should be the one who should uncover this," he said. "Because here is this thing that begins the persecution of the Jews, and a Jewish person has found it."

Patton whisked the documents out of Europe and deposited them with the Huntington Museum near his family property in California. The General later died in a car accident, and the museum, lacking instructions from Patton, secretly kept the documents in a vault for decades.

The laws appeared publicly for the first time in 1999 when the Huntington loaned them to the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. But Dannenberg didn't immediately receive the credit.

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"There was a comment that said General Patton found these documents and went in, guns blazing, to get them," said Richard Dannenberg. "When my father saw that, he said, 'wait a minute, that's not right. I'm the one who found the documents!'"

Dannenberg's story was later corroborated by government archivists and historians and the museum has since corrected its records.

"Had Patton not taken them back to California … these would have been used at the [Nuremberg War Crimes] trial, and when the trail was over, these records would have come to us in 1947," said National Archives senior archivist Greg Bradsher.

"What was significant about the find of the original Nuremberg Laws was … the symbolic nature of the documents themselves – what they intended to do and what they helped create," he said. "These were the first laws to marginalize a whole group of people before they came up with a definition of what a Jew was."

The documents will remain a permanent part of the U.S. Government collection of records from the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.