dtufail/nuremberg-trials-corpus huggingface dataset:
VON SCHIRACH: In 1940 I left the position as the leader of Youth, that is, I left the office of the Reich Youth Leadership of the NSDAP, but I retained the office of Reichsleiter for Youth Education and with that the entire responsibility for German youth. I received as an additional new post that of Gauleiter of Vienna, which was combined with the governmental post of Reichsstatthalter of Vienna and also that of Reich Defense Commissioner for Wehrkreis XVII.
DR. SAUTER: Witness, we want now to come back to your activity as Youth Leader. There is an affidavit by you here dated 4 December 1945, 3302-PS. In this affidavit you stated to the Prosecution in December that you acknowledge yourself to be responsible for all youth education in the Third Reich.
VON SCHIRACH: That is correct.
DR. SAUTER: Were you, when you gave the statement of guilt, under the impression that your successor, the late Reich Youth Leader Axmann, was dead?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes.
DR. SAUTER: You thought that he died in the last battles of the war?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes, I was convinced that he had died in Berlin.
DR. SAUTER: In the meantime, Witness, you have learned from newspaper reports that your successor as Reich Youth Leader, this man Axmann, is still alive. Is that correct?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes.
DR. SAUTER: Do you want then, today, to support your affidavit regarding your personal responsibility as Youth Leader without reservation; or do you want to limit it in any respect today?
VON SCHIRACH: I do not want to limit this affidavit in any way. Although during the last years of his life Hitler gave orders to the Youth of which I do not know and also my successor, Axmann, particularly in 1944, gave orders with which I am not acquainted since the relationship between us had been broken off due to the events of the war, I stand by the statement that I have made in the expectation that the Tribunal will consider me the only person responsible in Youth Leadership and that no other Youth Leader will be summoned before a court for actions for which I have assumed responsibility.
DR. SAUTER: Witness, I would now be interested in knowing whether possibly principles and directives which you received from Hitler or from any Party office or from any governmental quarter were the formula for your youth education; or whether, for your youth education, the principles were derived from the experiences which you had during your own youth and among the youth leaders of that time.
VON SCHIRACH: The latter is correct. Of course, the education of the Hitler Youth was an education on the basis of the National Socialist idea. But the specifically educational ideas did not originate with Hitler, they also did not originate with other leaders in the Party; they had their origin in youth itself, they originated with me, and they originated with my assistants.
DR. SAUTER: Perhaps you will be good enough now to explain to the Tribunal somewhat more In detail how you, yourself, arrived at those principles and that type of youth education, based on your own education, your personal development, and so forth?
VON SCHIRACH: I believe that the simplest way for me to do this would be for me here, very briefly, to sketch the story of my youth and describe also in that connection the youth organizations with which I came in contact. I can in that way save much time for my further statements. My father was a professional officer in the Garde-Kuerassier Regiment of the Kaiser. I was born in Berlin and one year later my father retired and moved to Weimar, where he took over the management of the Court Theater there, which later became the Weimar National Theater. Thus I grew up in Weimar, and that town, which in a certain sense is the native city of all Germans, I regard as my native city. My father was well off; our home offered a great deal of intellectual and artistic stimulation, above all in the literary and musical field, but apart from and beyond the educational opportunities of our home, it was the atmosphere of the town itself, that atmosphere of the classic and also the postclassic Weimar which influenced my development. It was most of all the genius loci, which early captured my imagination. It is directly due to those experiences of my youth that later on I led the youth back again, year after year, to Weimar and to Goethe. And the first document which is important in this connection for my case, which is Document Schirach-80, will prove just that. There is a brief reference in that document to one of the many speeches which I made in the course of my activity as Youth Leader to the leaders of the young generation, and in which I directed the youth to Goethe . . .
DR. SAUTER: May I interrupt you for a moment, Herr Von Schirach? In this Document Number Schirach-80, Mr. President, there is -on Page 133 of Schirach's document book-a brief report on a Reich Cultural Convention (Reichskulturtagung) of the Hitler Youth in Weimar. This happens to be a report from 1937, but the defendant has already told you that such cultural conventions of the Hitler Youth took place every year in Weimar, the city of Schiller and Goethe. In this report, Document 80 of document book Schirach, there is, for instance, discussion of a speech of the defendant on the importance of Goethe for the National Socialist education of youth. It is said, in this connection, that at that time Schirach stated, and I quote...
THE PRESIDENT: You need not read it to us, Dr. Sauter. It refers to Goethe, that is all.
DR. SAUTER: In that case, Herr Von Schirach, will you continue?
VON SCHIRACH: It was not only the annual cultural convention but the annual meeting of the leaders of the Hitler Youth which took place in Weimar. Apart from that there were also what we called the "Weimar Festivals of German Youth." What is important in this connection is that in this speech I quoted a sentence of Goethe which, to a certain extent, became the leitmotiv of all my educational work: "Youth fashions itself afresh from youth." Even my worst enemy cannot deny the fact that I was to the young generation of the German people at all times not only the propagandist of National Socialism but also the propagandist of Goethe. A certain Herr Ziemer has submitted a lengthy affidavit against me in which he quarrels with the youth education for which I am responsible. I believe that Herr Ziemer did his work a little too superficially. In his description of German national education he should at least have taken into consideration my educational efforts designed to guide youth toward the life work of Goethe. I joined my first youth organization when I was 10 years old. I was then just the age of the boys and girls who later on entered the Jungvolk. That youth organization which I joined was the so-called "Young German League," (Jungdeutschland Bund), which Count von der Goltz had founded, a Boy Scout organization. Count von der Goltz and Haeseler, impressed by the British Boy Scout movement, had formed Pathfinder units in Germany, and one of these Pathfinder organizations was the Jungdeutschland Bund just mentioned. It played an important part in the education of German youth until about 1918 or 1919. Much more significant in my development, however, was the time which I spent in a country boarding school (Waldpaedagogium). This was an educational institution directed by an associate of the well-known educator, Hermann Lietz. There I was educated in the way which I later, on an entirely different basis...
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Sauter, do you think the education of the defendant himself is in any way material for the Tribunal to hear? It is the education which he imparted which is the matter that is material. What he imparted, not what he himself took in.
DR. SAUTER: Mr. President, the defendant would nevertheless ask you to allow him these statements, particularly from the point of view that with them he wants to show you that the principles according to which he led youth education came to him not from Hitler and not from any Party source, but that they resulted from his own experiences in his own youth. It is, indeed, of some importance for the Tribunal to examine the question: According to what principles did the defendant direct youth education and how did he arrive at these principles? The defendant is asking permission to explain that.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, Dr. Sauter, the defendant has already taken some considerable time in telling us about his early youth and his education, and the Tribunal thinks that it ought to be cut short, and that not much more time ought to be taken up in dealing with the education of the defendant. As I have pointed out to you, what is material for us is the education he imparted to German youth and not the education which he received himself.
DR. SAUTER: We shall, of course, comply with your wish, Mr. President. [Turning to the defendant.] Herr Von Schirach, will you please make your statements as brief as possible?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes, I can be very brief.
DR. SAUTER: Please, go on.
VON SCHIRACH: Lietz' idea was to give youth an education in which they have in the school an image of the state. The school community was a miniature state and in this school community was developed a self-administration of youth. I only want to point out in passing that he, too, was applying ideas which long before him had been developed by Pestalozzi and the great Jean Jacques. All modern education, of course, goes back somehow to Rousseau, be it a question of Hermann Lietz or the Boy Scouts, the Pathfinder movement or the German Wandervogel movement. At any rate, that idea of self-administration of youth in a school community gave me my idea of the self-leadership of youth. My thought was to attract the younger generation in school to ideas that Froebel had originated 80 years before. Lietz wanted to win over youth from early school days onward. I may perhaps mention very briefly that when in 1898 Lietz began his educational work, the British Major Baden-Powell was being surrounded by rebels in a South African town, and was training youngsters to scout in the woods and with this laid the groundwork for his own Boy Scout movement, and that in that same year, in 1898, Karl Fischer from Berlin-Steglitz founded the Wandervogel movement.
DR. SAUTER: Witness, I think that this chapter, which is merely the historic background, might perhaps, in accordance with the wish of the President, be terminated now. If I understand you rightly then, you mean that those principles which you applied later on as Reich Youth Leader had become familiar to you in your own youth and in the youth movement of the time. Is that right?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes; basically, yes. The basic principles of my later work originate there.
DR. SAUTER: There is one more point I want to know in this connection. Did this education at that time have any political or anti-Semitic tendencies and how did you happen to get into politics?
VON SCHIRACH: No, that educational work had no political and most certainly no anti-Semitic tendencies, because Lietz came from the circles around the Democrat Naumann, from the Damaschke circle.
DR. SAUTER: But how did you get into politics?
VON SCHIRACH: In the meantime the revolution had broken out. My father...
DR. SAUTER: The revolution of 1918-1919?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes, the revolution of 1918-1919. My father had been thrown out of his position by the Reds. The National Assembly in Weimar had convened. The Weimar Republic had been founded. We had a parliamentary system, we had a democracy, or what we in Germany thought was a democracy-I doubt that it was one. It was about 1923. I was at home at the time. It was a period of general insecurity, want, and dissatisfaction; many respectable families had become beggars through the inflation, and the worker and the citizen had lost their savings. The name "Hitler" made its appearance in connection with the events of 9 November 1923. I was not able at the time to gain any exact information about him. This Trial has informed me and people of my generation for the first time what Hitler actually wanted. At that time I was not a National Socialist. Together with some boys of my age I joined a youth organization which had the name "Knappenschaft." It was in some way connected with the people's movement, but it was not bound to any party. The principles of that organization were simply comradeship, patriotism, and self-control There were about 100 boys from my city in it at the time who, in this youth organization, fought against the shallow tendencies of youth in the postwar period and against the dissipation indulged in by growing youngsters. In that circle, as a 16-year-old, I first came in contact with socialism, for here I found youths from every level, working boys, craftsmen, young office employees, sons of farmers. But there were some older ones among us too, who were already settled in life, and some also who had been in the World War. From discussions with these comrades I came to grasp for the first time the consequences of the Versailles Treaty in their full. import. The situation of the youth at the time was this: The school boy had the prospect of struggling through somehow or other as a working student, and then he would in all probability become a member of the academic proletariat for the possibility of an academic career practically did not exist for him at all.
VON SCHIRACH: The young worker had no prospect of finding an apprenticeship. For him there was nothing other than the grim misery of unemployment. It was a generation nobody would help unless it helped itself.
DR. SAUTER: And that circle to which you belonged as a 16-year-old boy, then, gradually drifted into the currents of National Socialism?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes, and in quite a natural way.
DR. SAUTER: How did it happen?
VON SCHIRACH: In central Germany there were disturbances. I need only mention the name of the Communist bandit leader, Max Holz, to indicate what conditions obtained at the time. And even after outward calm had come, conditions still prevailed that made it impossible to hold patriotic meetings because they were usually broken up by Communists. There came an appeal to us young people to furnish protection for these patriotic meetings, and we did. Some of us were wounded in doing this. One of us, a certain Garschar, was killed by Communists. In that manner a large number of national meetings took place which otherwise could not have been held in the Weimar Republic, National Socialist meetings, too; and to an increasing degree it was exactly such meetings that we had to protect because the Communist terror was directed against them particularly. Through this protective activity I met leading National Socialists at first as speakers, naturally, not personally. I heard Count Reventlow speak; I think I heard Rosenberg then too; I heard Streicher speak and heard the first oratorical efforts of Sauckel, who soon after became Gauleiter of the National Socialist Party in Thuringia. In this way...
THE PRESIDENT: What date is he speaking of?
DR. SAUTER: This is the period around 1924, that is, a year after the Hitler Putsch. In that way, Witness, the circle of which you were then a member came under National Socialist influences. Was this also supported with reading, reading of National Socialist literature?
VON SCHIRACH: Of course, I do not know what my comrades read, with the exception of one book which I shall give you directly I know only what I read myself; I was interested at that time in the writings of the Bayreuth thinker, Chamberlain, in The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century , in the writings of Adolf Bartels, in his Introduction to World Literature and History of German National Literature . There were works...
THE PRESIDENT: I have already told you that we do not want to know the full story of the defendant's education. He is now giving us a series of the books which he has read, but we are not interested.
DR. SAUTER: Very well, Mr. President.
VON SCHIRACH: I shall only say in one sentence that these were works which had no definite anti-Semitic tendencies, but through which anti-Semitism was drawn like a red thread. The decisive anti-Semitic book which I read at that time and the book which influenced my comrades...
DR. SAUTER: Please . . .
VON SCHIRACH: . . . was Henry Ford's book, The International Jew ; I read it and became anti-Semitic. In those days this book made such a deep impression on my friends and myself because we saw in Henry Ford the representative of success, also the exponent of a progressive social policy. In the poverty-stricken and wretched Germany of the time, youth looked toward America, and apart from the great benefactor, Herbert Hoover, it was Henry Ford who to us represented America.
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Sauter, the Tribunal thinks, as I have said twice now, that the educational influences of the defendant are quite irrelevant to us. I do not want to say it again and, unless you can control the defendant and keep him to the point, I shall have to stop his evidence.
DR. SAUTER: But, Mr. President, is it not of interest to the Tribunal when judging this defendant and his personality that they know how the defendant became a National Socialist and how the defendant became anti-Semitic? I had thought...
THE PRESIDENT: No, it is not of interest to the Tribunal.
DR. SAUTER: Witness, how did you then meet Hitler and how did you happen to join the Party?
VON SCHIRACH: I must say that I did not become a National Socialist because of anti-Semitism but because of Socialism. I met Hitler as early as 1925. He had just left Landsberg on the Lech, his imprisonment was ended, and he came to Weimar and spoke there. It was on that occasion that I was introduced to him. The program for the national community which he developed appealed to me so enormously because in it I found on a large scale something I had experienced in a small way in the camaraderie of my youth organization. He appeared to me to be the man who would pave the way into the future for our generation. I believed that through him there could be offered to this younger generation the prospect of work, of happiness. And in him I saw the man who would liberate us from the shackles of Versailles. I am convinced that without Versailles the rise to power of Hitler would never have happened. That dictate led to dictatorship.
DR. SAUTER: Witness, when did you then become a member of the Party?
VON SCHIRACH: I became a member of The Party in 1925. I joined the SA at the same time, with all my comrades.
DR. SAUTER: You were 18 at the time?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes.
DR. SAUTER: Why did you join the SA?
VON SCHIRACH: The SA furnished the protection for the meetings, and we simply continued in the SA, as part of the Party, the activities which we had carried out before in our youth organization.
DR. SAUTER: In 1926, Witness, that is when you were 19 years old, there was a Party rally ire Weimar?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes.
DR. SAUTER: As far as I know, you talked to Hitler personally on that occasion; is that correct?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes. I was to have talked personally to Hitler one year earlier. On this occasion there was another meeting. He was making speeches at various mass meetings in Weimar, and he came back to Weimar again during the same year to speak before a smaller circle. Together with Rudolf Hess he paid a visit to the home of my parents and on that occasion he suggested that I should study in Munich.
DR. SAUTER: Why?
VON SCHIRACH: He thought I ought to know the Party at its very core and thought I would become acquainted with the Party work in that way. But I want to say here that at that time I did not have any intention at all of becoming a politician. Nevertheless, I was very much interested, of course, in getting acquainted with the Movement at the place where it had been founded.
DR. SAUTER: You went, then, to Munich, and studied there?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes, I then went to Munich. At first I did not concern myself with the Party. I was occupied with Germanic studies, history, and the history of art; I wrote and I came into contact with many people in Munich who were not actually National Socialists but who belonged, I should say, to the periphery of the National Socialist movement. At that time I lived in the house of my friend, the publisher Bruckmann...
DR. SAUTER: Then in 1929 you became the head of the Movement within the universities. I think you were elected, not nominated, to that post?
VON SCHIRACH: The situation at the beginning was this: I attended Party meetings in Munich; in Bruckmann's salon I met Hitler and Rosenberg and many other men who later played an important role in Germany. And at the university I joined the university group of the National Socialist German Students League.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, go on.
DR. SAUTER: Go on, Herr Von Schirach, you have just told us that you joined this university group in Munich. Will you please continue?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes, and I also started to take an active part in this group. I spoke there before my comrades, at first about my own work in the literary field, and then I began to give lectures to the students also about the National Socialist movement. I organized Hitler student meetings among the students in Munich, and then I was elected a member of the General Students Committee, the ASTA, and through this activity among the students I came more and more into contact with the Party leadership. In 1929, the man who was the then so-called Reich Leader of the National Socialist Students Union retired, and the question arose of who should be given the leadership of all the university groups. At that time Rudolf Hess, on behalf of the Fuehrer, questioned all university groups of the National Socialist University Movement and the majority of all these groups cast their vote for me to head the National Socialist Students Union. This accounts for the curious fact that I am the only Party leader who was elected into the Party leadership. That is something which has otherwise never occurred in the history of the Party.
DR. SAUTER: You mean to say by that, that all the others were nominated, and you alone were elected?
VON SCHIRACH: I was elected, and then I was confirmed in office.
DR. SAUTER: And if I am right, you were elected at the students' meeting at Graz in 1931.
VON SCHIRACH: That is not correct. That is wrong. I am now talking only of the National Socialist University Movement; I will come back to this point later. Now I was leader of the National Socialist University Movement, and I reorganized this movement. I began my work as a speaker. In 1931 I was...
THE PRESIDENT: Surely it is sufficient that he became the leader. It really does not matter very much to us whether he was elected or not.
DR. SAUTER: Mr. President, I am making every effort all the time to abbreviate this speech. But perhaps I may ask just one more question with reference to this subject. Witness, then in 1931 you were, as far as I know, elected to the presidency of the General Congress of Austrian and German Students, comprising all parties, and elected, I think, unanimously. Is that correct?
VON SCHIRACH: It is not correct
DR. SAUTER: Then explain briefly, Herr Von Schirach.
VON SCHIRACH: That is not correct. At the meeting of the General German Students Congress in 1931, at which all German students and all Austrian students and Sudeten-German students were represented, one of my collaborators whom I had suggested as leader was unanimously elected head of the entire student group. This was a very important affair for the youth and for the Party. Two years before the seizure of power the entire academic youth had unanimously given their vote to a National Socialist. After this students' rally at Graz, I had with Hitler a...
THE PRESIDENT: I think this would be a convenient time to adjourn.
DR. SAUTER: Very well. [A recess was taken.]
DR. SAUTER: Witness, before the recess eve stopped at the fact that in 1929 you had been elected the leader of the academic youth. Two years later, Hitler made you Reich Youth Leader. How did that appointment come about?