In the course of documentation projects worked out by the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance (Dokumentations-archiv des oesterreichischen Widerstandes) and the Department for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna, for the first time committed young scholars checked through the wide mountain of court records kept in the file archives of the Austrian courts of Justice and realized the uniqueness of these files.

These court records reveal numerous NS-crimes hitherto partly unknown by researches for History of Law and Contemporary History, but they also show on what a large scale Austrian police, prosecuting attorney's offices and courts have been endeavoured to solve these crimes during the first post-war years.

Irrespective of the prevailing outcome of these trials this historical treasure represents a political moral obligation as well as a scholarly challenge: up to now no registers are existing which would enable to assign trials to a particular complex of crime or to assign crimes to a particular place - therefore also would allow to disperse these crimes from questions of individual blame and to value them on a larger scale of Austrian responsibility for history.

That is why the Zentrale oesterreichische Forschungsstelle Nachkriegsjustiz (Austrian Research Center for Post-War Trials) has been founded on December 14th in 1998 closely linked to the Austrian State Archives and the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance. Since 2001 the Austrian Research Center is constituted as a non-profit organization strictly for scholarly purposes only.