dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
DR. SIEMERS: When the Prosecution came to the opposite conclusion regarding Raeder, this was due-as I have already emphasized in my introduction-only to their misconception of the actual and juridical facts; they regarded Raeder as politician and soldier. But he was a soldier only. He lived for the Navy alone, for the welfare of the Navy, for which he is now equally prepared to bear responsibility to the full extent. He led the Navy along uniform lines and, aided by his officer corps, taught it those decent views and that form of chivalrous fighting which humanity expects of a soldier. It must not be allowed to happen that, as a result of the deeds of a Hitler and his National Socialism, the officers and soldiers of this Navy be defamed by hearing their highest-ranking officer declared a criminal. From a historical viewpoint Raeder may be guilty, because he, like many others within the country and abroad, did not recognize or see through Hitler and did not have the strength to resist the dynamic strength of a Hitler; but such an omission is no crime. What Raeder did or left undone in his life occurred in the belief that he was acting correctly and that as a dutiful soldier he had to act in such a way. Raeder is a highly esteemed officer who is no criminal; and he cannot be a criminal, since all his life he has lived honorably and as a Christian. A man who believes in God does not commit crimes, and a soldier who believes in God is not a war criminal. I therefore ask the High Tribunal to acquit Admiral Dr. Erich Raeder on all points of the Indictment.
PRESIDENT: I call on Dr. Sauter for the Defendant Von Schirach.
DR. SAUTER: Gentlemen of the Tribunal, Baldur von Schirach, who at that time was Reich Youth Leader, in 1936 welcomed the guests to the Olympic Games in Berlin with the following words: "Youth throws a bridge across all frontiers and seas! I call upon the Youth of the World and through them, upon Peace!" And Baldur von Schirach, then Gauleiter of Vienna, said to Hitler in 1940: "Vienna cannot be conquered with bayonets, but only with music." Those two utterances are characteristic of the nature of this defendant. It is the task of the Defense to examine the evidence produced in this Trial for the purpose of ascertaining whether the same Baldur von Schirach, who expressed such thoughts, really committed those crimes against law and humanity with which he is charged by the Prosecution. Schirach is the youngest defendant here. He is also, of all the defendants, the one who was by far the youngest when joining the Party, which he did when he was not yet 18. Those facts in themselves are perhaps of some significance in judging his case. When still at school he came under the spell of rising National Socialism; he was particularly attracted by the Socialist idea, which had already in his country school recognized no difference between the sons of fathers of different classes and professions; those boys around Schirach saw in the popular movement of the twenties in Germany a promise of the resurgence of our fatherland from the aftermath of the lost Great War into a happy future; and fate willed it that as early as 1925, when he was seventeen, Schirach came into personal contact with Hitler in Weimar, Goethe's home. Hitler's personality made a fascinating impression on young Schirach, as he himself admitted; the program for the National Community (Volksgemeinschaft), which Hitler had evolved at that time, met with Schirach's wholehearted enthusiasm, because he thought he saw reproduced therein on a full-size scale that which he had personally experienced in a small way in the comradeship of the country school and in his youth organization.
DR. SAUTER: To him and his comrades Hitler appeared as the man who would open for the younger generation the road into the future; of him this younger generation had hopes for its prospects of work, its prospects of a secure existence, its prospects of a happy life. Thus the young man became a convinced National Socialist; this fact was the result of the environment in which he had spent his youth and which formed a soil only too fertile for the growth of that ideology which young Schirach embraced because at that period he held it to be the right one. This environment of his childhood and a vast amount of one-sided political literature, which the young man devoured in his thirst for knowledge, made of him, while still an inexperienced youth, also an anti-Semite. He certainly did not become an anti-Semite in the sense of those fanatics who ultimately did not shrink even from acts of violence and pogroms, of those who finally created an Auschwitz and murdered millions of Jews; but an anti-Semite in the moderate sense, who would merely curb Jewish influence in the government of the state and in cultural life but for the rest would leave untouched the freedom and rights of Jewish fellow citizens and who never thought of exterminating the Jewish people. At least that is the conception of Hitler's anti-Semitism which young Schirach evolved during those years. That this was really Schirach's opinion is also substantiated by the statement which Schirach made here on the morning of 24 May 1946, when he described without reservation the crimes committed by Hitler as a shameful episode in German history, as a crime which fills every German with shame; that statement in which he openly states that Auschwitz must signify the end of any and every racial and anti-Semitic policy.
DR. SAUTER: That statement here in this courtroom came from the bottom of the heart of the Defendant Schirach; it was the result of the terrible disclosures which this Trial brought to him also, and Schirach made this statement here openly before the public in order to bring back German youth from a wrong path to the road of justice and tolerance. Gentlemen, I would now like to bring to your attention the more important accusations which have been raised against Schirach, and the major results which the evidence has produced in the various points. The Defendant Schirach is first of all accused of the fact that before the seizure of power, that is, before the year 1933, he actively promoted the National Socialist Party and the youth organization affiliated with it and that he thereby contributed to the rise of the Party to power. He had been, as stated in the trial brief, a close and abject follower of Hitler; he had stood in blind loyalty to Hitler and the latter's National Socialist world of thinking; and he had, as leader of the student's league, led the students ideologically and politically to National Socialism and won them over to it. All this, if Your Honors please, is not denied by Schirach in any manner. He has done what he is being accused of in this respect; this he confesses openly, and for this he naturally takes responsibility' The only thing which he denies with regard to this, and all the more emphatically with regard to the later period, is the accusation that he participated in a conspiracy. Schirach himself pointed out that the Leadership Principle and dictatorship in their character and their theory are absolutely incompatible with the idea of a conspiracy, and a conspiracy appears to him a logical impossibility if many millions of members are to be included and when its existence and aims lie exposed before the country concerned as well as before the world.
DR. SAUTER: We furthermore know from the results of this Trial that Hitler, aside from Bormann and Himmler, did not have a single friend or adviser with whom he discussed his plans and aims; on the contrary he carried the Leadership Principle to the furthest extreme. He dispensed with all advisory meetings or discussions which might have affected his decisions in any way, reaching his decisions all by himself without even listening to the opinion of those closest to him. For him it was a matter of orders on his own part, and unconditional obedience on that of the others. I wish to refrain from further statements about that chapter, but that is what the "conspiracy" really looked like; and all of us who have witnessed this Trial would never have felt this ultra-radical application of the Leadership Principle to be possible had not all the defendants and all the witnesses familiar with the facts, in complete agreement and without a single exception, presented the same picture to us over and over again. Now Schirach is not denying at all that already in his very early years he came completely under the influence of Hitler, that he placed himself with his whole young personality at the service of these ideas, and that at the time, as stated quite correctly in the Indictment, he was devoted to Hitler with unconditional loyalty. If this was a crime on the part of young Schirach, a crime which millions of older, more experienced, mature Germans have committed with him, then you, as his judges, may condemn him for this if our code of law furnishes a legal basis for it. That would be but a further disappointment in addition to the many others which he has been experiencing for years. Schirach knows today that he gave loyal support unto the end to a man who did not deserve it; and he also knows today that the ideas, about which he was enthusiastic in his young years and for which he sacrificed himself, led in practice to ends of which he himself had never dreamed.
DR. SAUTER: But even the Schirach of today, purged by many bitter experiences, cannot see any criminal act in the activity of his younger years which he carried out in good faith, together with millions of other Germans, for Hitler and his Party. For the Party at that time appeared quite legal to him; Schirach never had any doubt that it also came into power by legal means. The seizure of power by the Party, the appointment of Hitler as Reich Chancellor by Reich President Von Hindenburg, the winning of the majority of the people for the Party by repeated elections, all this confirmed to young Schirach again and again the legality of the movement he had joined. If today he were to be punished because he acknowledged as his Fuehrer this same Hitler whom millions of Germans and all the countries of the world recognized as legal head of the State, Schirach would never be able to acknowledge such a decision as being just. In spite of the severe judgment which he himself has pronounced in this courtroom on Hitler according to his personal conviction, he would consider himself a victim of his political convictions if he were to be sentenced because, as a young enthusiastic man, he joined the National Socialist Party and collaborated in its construction and seizure of power. At the time he did not look upon that as a crime but from his standpoint considered it his patriotic duty. The second and by far more important accusation which has been raised against the Defendant Von Schirach is to the effect that he, as Reich Youth Leader in the years 1932 to 1940, to quote the Indictment literally, "poisoned the thought of youth with Nazi ideology and especially trained it for aggressive war." Schirach has always contested this claim. emphatically, and this claim has not been substantiated by the results of the evidence either.
DR. SAUTER: The 1aNv on the Hitler Youth of 1936 described Schirach's task as Reich Youth Leader as being "to educate youth, outside the parental home and outside school, physically, intellectually, and morally for service to the people and to the national community in the spirit of National Socialism through the Hitler Youth movement and its leader," that is, the Defendant Von Schirach. This was the program. This program is repeated word for word in the enactment decree of 1939, which was postponed for so long-3 years-because Schirach did not want to introduce compulsory membership until the movement already practically included the entire German youth on the basis of voluntary membership, so that future joining by compulsion would exist on paper only. The Hitler Youth program, as it was formulated by Schirach In his speeches and writings-and no other program of the Hitler Youth exists-does not contain a single word which would point toward military education of youth, much less an education in aggressive warfare; nor does in practice the education of youth, in Schirach's opinion, in any way give evidence of a military education of German youth for such a purpose. In that respect the point was stressed by the Prosecution that the Hitler Youth movement was organized in various detachments and divisions. That is true, although the designations listed by the Prosecution are not correct and although they have not the slightest reference to military formations. But in the last analysis every youth movement the World over will show a classification into smaller or larger units; each of these units naturally will also need a name and some responsible leader. As in the other countries, so also in the German Hitler Youth the leader of the unit was discernible by some sign of his rank, be it a leader's cord, stars, or other insignia of rank. This naturally has nothing to do with the military character of youth education.
DR. SAUTER: From personal familiarity with the practice in foreign countries Schirach knows that foreign youth organizations, in Switzerland as well as in France and other countries, have similar classifications and similar insignia, although it never occurred to us so far to make that a reason for considering such foreign youth organizations as military associations. It was furthermore stressed that formations of male youth in Germany were also given training in shooting. That is also correct but equally proves very little, in the opinion of Schirach, because the shooting instruction for the Hitler Youth organization took place, without exception, with small-bore rifles, in other words, with a type of short, light target rifle which is nowhere in the world considered as a military weapon and which is not even mentioned in the enumeration of military weapons in the Versailles Treaty. The Hitler Youth movement in Germany did not possess a single military weapon, no infantry rifle or machine gun, no power-driven airplane, no cannon or tank, throughout its whole existence. After all, when speaking OI military training, then such training would primarily have had to take place with military weapons such as are used in modern warfare. To be sure, as has been established in the cross-examination of Schirach, in order to give added importance to his office, a certain Dr. Stellrecht, the technical adviser on shooting instruction in the leadership of the Reich Youth movement attempted to ascribe a certain special importance to this particular branch of youth training. Schirach, however, was able to show without being refuted that for this very reason differences of opinion arose between him and this technical adviser and that he therefore finally dismissed Dr. Stellrecht because he, Schirach, opposed any development which might have tended toward military training of youth. In any case, this very Dr.
DR. SAUTER: Stellrecht, who was produced by the Prosecution as a witness against Schirach, nevertheless for his part admitted that "not a single boy in Germany was trained in handling weapons of war" and that "not one boy was given a military weapon." That is, word for word, the testimony of Stellrecht. Also of importance in considering these questions is the fact that Schirach, as a matter of principle, refused to permit young people to be trained by active officers or former officers because he considered these persons entirely unsuitable to educate young people in that spirit which he envisaged as the goal of his activity. Moreover, neither Schirach nor any of his closer associates were officers before the war; and the same holds true for the overwhelming majority of the high or low ranking HJ leaders subordinate to him. All these facts are firmly established by the testimony of the Defendant Schirach himself and through depositions made by the witnesses Lauterbacher, Gustav Hoepken, and Maria Hoepken during their examination. For many years these witnesses were Schirach's closest collaborators; they are thoroughly familiar with his views and principles and they have unanimously confirmed that it is entirely incorrect to speak of a military or even premilitary training of the Hitler Youth. At this point, Gentlemen, I should like to add one thing. I have just mentioned, as a witness, the name Lauterbacher. The Prosecution, during their cross-examination, made an attempt to impugn the credibility of the witness Lauterbacher by asking him, during his interrogation on 27 April 1946, how many people he had hanged publicly and furthermore by charging that he had ordered four or five hundred prisoners from the penitentiary in Hameln to be poisoned or shot.
DR. SAUTER: In this connection the American prosecutor had submitted seven affidavits under Exhibit USA-874, among them one by a certain Josef Kramer, who in fact made the assertion in his affidavit that the witness Lauterbacher, who appeared here for Schirach, in his function as Gauleiter of Hanover had given him orders for the murder of the prisoners. During the Court's session of 27 May 1946, I protested against the use of that affidavit by Kramer and produced, Gentlemen, a newspaper article according to which the witness Kramer, on 2 May 1946, had been sentenced to 7 years' imprisonment by a court of the 5th British Division. Several days ago I submitted as evidence a report from the Rhein-Neckar Zeitung of 6 July 1946 which states that the witness Hartmann Lauterbacher in the meantime had been acquitted by the Supreme British Military Court in Hanover. From that it can be seen that the doubts which the Prosecution cast upon the credibility of the witness Lauterbacher and which they based on the affidavit of this Kramer were unfounded. May I now continue in my presentation on Page 8. With reference to the promilitary training of the HJ it has also been repeatedly emphasized in rebuttal that the Hitler Youth wore a uniform. That is correct, but proves nothing, for the youth organizations of other countries, too, are accustomed, as is generally known, to wear a common costume, some sort of uniform, without anybody for this reason terming them military or semimilitary organizations; and Schirach and several of his associates have informed me that in many democratic countries, which certainly do not contemplate war, much less a war of aggression, male youth is trained in handling proper military weapons and that every year contests are held in shooting with military rifles. Why was it that Schirach introduced a uniform for the Hitler Youth-and indeed not only for the boys but also for the girls? We have heard the answer to this from several witnesses.
DR. SAUTER: Schirach, I may quote here, saw in the uniform of the boys and in the uniform costume of the girls the "dress of socialism," the "dress of comradeship." Schirach wrote at that time already that the child of the rich industrialist was to wear the same clothes as the child of the miner, the son of the millionaire the same clothes as the son of an unemployed man. The uniform of the Hitler Youth was to be, as Schirach wrote in 1934 in his book The Hitler Youth, the expression of an attitude which did not consider class and property, but only effort and achievement. The uniform of the Hitler Youth was for Schirach, as expressed further in this same book; "not the sign of any militarism, but the symbol of the idea of the Hitler Youth, namely, classless society," in the spirit of the election slogan which he gave the Hitler Youth in 1933: "Through Socialism to the Nation." Schirach remained faithful to the principle expressed in these quotations as long as he was Youth Leader. Thus, in the official publication of the Hitler Youth in 1937, he wrote-I quote word for word: "The uniform is not the expression of a martial attitude but the dress of comradeship; it overcomes class difference and re-establishes social equality for the child of the most insignificant laborer; the young generation in our new Germany must be united in an inseparable community." Schirach had this comradeship and this socialism in mind when, in 1934, he describes in his book The Hitler Youth how he conceived this socialism; and I quote again, word for word: "Socialism does not mean taking the fruits of his work away from one person in order to give everybody something produced by the work of one individual. Everyone shall work, but everyone shall also harvest the fruits of his work. Nor must one person be allowed to get rich while thousands of others must suffer want for his sake. Whoever exploits his workers and spoliates the community in order to fill his cash box is an enemy of the German people" (Document Schirach-55).
DR. SAUTER: That ends the quotation describing the attitude of Von Schirach at that time. Schirach has pointed out again and again in his numerous writings, articles, and speeches, which have been collected in the document book and have been submitted to the Tribunal, that, to use his expression, he did not desire any "pseudo-military drill," which would only spoil the joy of the young people' in their movement. The training of the young people in small-bore shooting was in line with the training in all sports activities and corresponded to the inclination of the boys, in all countries,. who are particularly interested in the sport of shooting. But this training played a very minor role in volume and importance by comparison with the greater aims which Schirach pursued in the Hitler Youth movement, about which not only Schirach but the other witnesses examined give as clear a testimony as the writings and speeches of Von Schirach. These aims of the Hitler Youth education shall be listed here briefly as they have been demonstrated by the presentation of evidence; Schirach is naturally not accused in connection with these other aims of the Hitler Youth education, but one must nevertheless consider and evaluate them when desiring to obtain a total picture of his personality, his activity, and his plans. Apart from this education of youth in terms of comradeship and of socialism in the sense of overcoming class distinction, Schirach had, as he explained here, primarily four aims in mind: First the training of youth in the various types of sports, and in connection therewith juvenile health supervision; this branch of youth education took up a very large part of Hitler Youth activities, and the fact that German youth obtained such an unexpected success at the Olympic Games in 1936 was to a certain extent due to the activity of the Hitler Youth leadership in cooperation with the Reich Sports Leader Von Tschammer-Osten.