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WWII Courts-Martial: Europe

The case of Private Eddie Slovik: accused, charges, trial details and the full opinion text
The case of Private Eddie Slovik: accused, charges, trial details and the full opinion text
Search 1,884 opinions by name, place or crime, with filters
Search 1,884 opinions by name, place or crime, with filters
Statistics by offence type, place and year
Statistics by offence type, place and year
Browse the cases by Article of War
Browse the cases by Article of War

Description

WWII Courts-Martial: Europe makes the written opinions of the U.S. Army’s Board of Review in Europe searchable. When American soldiers were convicted by court-martial between 1942 and 1946, a panel of Army lawyers reviewed each case. Their 1,884 opinions record who was tried, for what, where, and the sentence they received.

The source is the 34 volumes of Holdings and Opinions, Board of Review, Branch Office of the Judge Advocate General, European Theater of Operations (1943–1946), digitised by the Law Library of Congress. An ETL pipeline reads every page with OCR (Tesseract), splits the volumes into individual cases, and extracts names, ranks, charges, dates, places and sentences. A spelling-correction pass cleans up the OCR text, and forty cases were checked by hand against the original pages.

Visitors can search by name, place or crime, filter by Article of War, offence, year, country, sentence and confinement facility, or browse by crime, place and prison. Each case page gives the original volume and page, and can be exported to Word, Markdown or plain text.

A statistics page charts the cases by offence type, place and year, and a public QC report shows the quality checks.

Technology

  • Python
  • Flask
  • ETL pipeline
  • OCR (Tesseract)
  • Interactive charts