When I worked as a senior producer at Courtroom TV Network, I had an intern who swore that film existed of the Nuremberg war crime trials. He convinced me to let him go to D.C. to check out the National Archives. He returned to tell me that what they had was a wire recording of the entire trial, which lasted for months. And they had 5 minutes of silent film that was shot every day, presumably one reel of film. More importantly (this was maybe 1995) they had a player and would make us a dub of the wire recording... but not of the entire trial. So we needed a transcript to pick out what portion of the recording we wanted dubbed. But the transcript was thousands of pages, only available in Boston, and would take weeks to read, so that wouldn't work. Then we discovered that a professor had somehow scanned and OCR'd the typed transcript, and was selling it on a set of CDs for less than $100.
So we divided up the transcript among several staffers, focusing on the key players such as Goering and Speer, and whittled what we needed down to 10-15 hours of testimony. We then got our wire dub, married that to the film we had from each day, and still photos, and recreated about six hours of the trial, which we showed over several days.
Anyway, the point being that it was amazing to hear for the first time in 50 years the actual voices of Hermann Goering and Albert Speer and other top Nazis—all surviving because of the durability of the wire recording. Thank goodness it was not done on 8-track tape.
