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. 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.

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 Führer 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.

The law 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.

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 of 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. 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. In this connection the

American prosecutor had submitted seven affidavits under Exhibit

USA-874, among them one by a certain Josef Krämer, 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 Krämer and produced, Gentlemen, a newspaper article

according to which the witness Krämer, 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 Krämer were

unfounded.

May I now continue in my presentation on Page 8.

With reference to the premilitary 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. 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).

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 co-operation with the Reich Sports Leader Von

Tschammer-Osten.

Another aim was postgraduate training and advancement of working youth

and the improvement of the position of adolescent wage earners through

youth legislation, particularly by prohibiting night work, increasing

spare time, granting paid vacations, prohibiting child labor, raising

the protected age of adolescents, _et cetera_. Advanced vocational

training was promoted so successfully that finally more than a million

boys and girls entered for the annual occupational competitions, and

from year to year the average performance in each branch rose very

considerably.

A third main aim of youth education was the promotion of love of nature,

far away from the dens of iniquity of large cities, through hiking trips

and in youth hostels. Thousands of youth homes and youth hostels were

built in the course of these years on Schirach’s initiative out of the

Hitler Youth movement’s own funds, in order to get the young people out

of the large cities with their temptations and vices and return them to

rural life to show them the beauties of the homeland and to afford a

vacation to even the poorest child.

But Schirach concentrated his chief attention on the fourth goal of

youth education, namely, co-operation with the youth of other nations;

and this activity is a particularly suitable test for the question as to

whether one can accuse the Defendant Von Schirach of having taken part

in the planning of wars of aggression and of having committed crimes

against peace. Schirach has told us here on the witness stand that time

and again, both in summer and winter of every year, foreign youth groups

were the guests of German youth; and it is shown by the documents in Von

Schirach’s document book that, for instance, already in the year 1936 no

less than 200,000 foreign youths received overnight lodgings in German

youth hostels, and correspondingly year after year German youth

delegations went abroad, especially to England and France, in order to

enable young people to get acquainted with and respect one another.

Those very endeavors of Schirach’s, which would be absolutely

incompatible with any intention to prepare wars of aggression, received

unreserved recognition abroad before the war. In 1937 in one of the

special numbers of the Hitler Youth magazine _Wille und Macht_ dedicated

to this task of understanding, which was also published in French and

circulated very widely in France and which is quoted here only as an

example, the French Prime Minister Chautemps—I have the evidence in the

document book—declared his willingness, as head of the French

Government, to promote these peaceful meetings.

“I wish”—he wrote—“that the young men of both nations could

live every year side by side by the thousands and in this way

learn to know, to understand, and to respect each other.” And

further:

“Our two nations know that an understanding between them would

be one of the most valuable factors for world peace; therefore

it is the duty of all those on either side of the frontier who

have a clear view and human feeling to work for the

understanding and _rapprochement_ of both nations. But no one

could do it more sincerely and more enthusiastically than the

leaders of our wonderful youth, of French and German youth. If

they could manage to unite this youth, they would hold in their

hands the future of European and human culture” (Document

Schirach-110).

The mayor of Versailles of that time wrote in the same spirit to

Schirach, ending his appeal in the monthly organ of the Hitler Youth

with the words:

“The education of youth in this spirit is one of the most

important tasks of the politicians of both our countries”

(Document Schirach-111).

The French Ambassador, François Poncet, gave credit to Schirach’s

efforts no less heartily in the same publication under the title “Youth

as a Bridge” and concluded his lengthy article with the words:

“French participation enriches German soil. German influence

fertilizes the French spirit.... May this exchange develop

further. May also the generations which will at some time

benefit from it contribute to bringing the two halves of

Charlemagne’s empire closer and to create between them those

relations of mutual respect, harmony, and good comradeship for

which both nations are deeply longing, because their instinct

tells them that the welfare of European culture depends on it

and because they know for certain, when they look into

themselves, that they have many more reasons to respect and

admire than to hate each other” (Document Schirach-112).

And Schirach himself answered in the next issue of his monthly

publication, which also appeared in French, with an enthusiastic article

under the title, “Salute to France!” In it he writes, for instance:

“The _rapprochement_ of our two peoples is a European task of

such urgent necessity that youth has no time to lose in order to

work for its achievement.”—He then continues—“Youth is the

best ambassador in the world; it is disinterested, frank, and

without the eternal distrust of which diplomats can frequently

not be cured because, to a certain extent, it is their

professional disease. However, there must be no propaganda

intentions hidden behind youth exchange.”—And he concludes—“I

consider it now my task to bring about an exchange of views

between German and French youth, which must not, on the German

side, consist of nice statements from me, but of many personal

conversations of thousands of young Germans with just as many

young Frenchmen. One must believe in youth because they, above

all, can achieve a true understanding.”

At the end Schirach calls attention to the fact that all higher youth

leaders of the German Hitler Youth movement had a short time previously

expressed their respect in the name of the young generation of Germany

to the French Unknown Warrior by placing a wreath under the Arc de

Triomphe, and he concludes with the words:

“The dead of the Great War died while fulfilling their patriotic

duty and nobly devoting themselves to the ideal of liberty, and

Germans as well as French were always filled with respect for a

gallant foe. If the dead respected each other, then the living

should try to shake hands. If the returned combat veterans of

both nations could become comrades, why should the sons and

grandsons not become friends?” (Document Schirach-113.)

These, Gentlemen of the Tribunal, are the words of the same Baldur von

Schirach whom the Prosecution tries to brand as a deliberate partner in

a Hitlerian conspiracy for war. The Prosecution wants to make a war

criminal out of this untiring prophet for international understanding

and peace, who is charged with having militarized youth and prepared it,

bodily and psychologically, for wars of aggression and of having worked

against peace. So far, the Prosecution has not been able to furnish

evidence to this effect.

Schirach has written various doctrinal books for youth, which were held

against him in the trial brief; he has published a quantity of essays on

a vast variety of problems of youth education; his innumerable speeches

addressed to youth have been printed; his orders and instructions to

youth are available to you and the Prosecution in collected form. Yet it

must be concluded that among all these, which constitute his views

during the whole of the time when he was active as Reich Youth Leader,

not a single item is to be found in which he made inflammatory remarks

in favor of war or preached attacks against other countries.

The Prosecution has stated in this very connection that he referred to

the “Lebensraum” in his book _The Hitler Youth_, which I have repeatedly

mentioned, and by so doing adopted as his own a slogan of Hitlerite

aggression policy. This claim is incorrect, for the whole book, _The

Hitler Youth_, does not, any more than every other speech and writing of

Schirach, contain this word at all. True, he has referred at two points

to “Eastern space” in his book, _The Hitler Youth_, published in 1936;

but he quite obviously did not in any way employ this term with

reference to Polish or Soviet-Russian territories but to the eastern

provinces of the former German Empire, that is to say, to territories

which formerly belonged to. Germany; they were known to be very thinly

populated and well suited for the settlement of excess German

population.

Nowhere has Schirach, I would like to state in conclusion with regard to

this topic, at any time up to the outbreak of the second World War

expressed the idea that he might wish Germany to conquer foreign

territories; neither has he ever uttered the odious slogans of the

German “Master Race” or the “Sub-humanity” of other nations; on the

contrary, he was always in favor of preserving peace with the

neighboring nations and always advocated the peaceful settlement of any

conflicts that cropped up out of inevitable clashes of interests.

Gentlemen of the Tribunal, had Hitler possessed but a fraction of the

love of peace which his Youth Leader preached time and again, then

perhaps this war would have been spared us Germans and the whole world.

PRESIDENT: We will adjourn now.

[_The Tribunal adjourned until 18 July at 1000 hours._]

ONE HUNDRED

AND EIGHTY-FIRST DAY

Thursday, 18 July 1946

_Morning Session_

MARSHAL: May it please the Tribunal, the Defendants Hess, Von

Ribbentrop, and Fritzsche are absent.

DR. SAUTER: May it please the Tribunal, yesterday at the end of my

statement I dealt with the charge of the Prosecution that the Defendant

Von Schirach had trained and educated the youth of the Third Reich in a

military sense, that he had prepared them for the waging of aggressive

wars and had participated in a conspiracy against peace. Now I turn to a

further accusation which has been made by the Prosecution against

Defendant Von Schirach.

Since the Prosecution could not prove that the Defendant Von Schirach

had ever promoted Hitler’s war policy before the war, he is being

charged with having had various connections with the SS and SA, and

especially with the fact that the SS, the SA, and the Leadership Corps

of the Party obtained their recruits from the Hitler Youth. This last

fact is quite correct, but it proves nothing as to Schirach’s attitude

toward Hitler’s war policy and is equally pointless as regards the

question of his participation in Hitler’s war conspiracy. For since 90

or 95 percent or more of German youth belonged to the Hitler Youth

movement it was only natural that the Party and its formations as the

years went by should receive their young recruits in an ever-increasing

measure from the Hitler Youth. Practically no other youth was available.

The Prosecution has referred to the agreement between the Reich Youth

Leadership and the Reichsführer SS, dated October 1938, concerning the

patrol service of the Hitler Youth, which was submitted to Your Honors

as Document 2396-PS; however, no inference can be drawn therefrom, for

patrol service in the Hitler Youth was merely an institution designed to

check up on and supervise the discipline of Hitler Youth members when

they appeared in public. It was, therefore, a kind of organization

police which was employed by the Hitler Youth movement entirely within

its own ranks. In order, however, to guard against difficulties with the

regular Police, an arrangement with the Reichsführer SS Himmler was

necessary because as chief of the whole police organization in Germany

he might have made trouble for the institution of the HJ patrol service.

This was the only object of the agreement of October 1938, which in

reality had just as little to do with providing recruits for the SS as

with the conduct and preparation of war. Moreover, it can clearly be

seen how resolutely Schirach strove against any influence on the part of

the Party over the Hitler Youth from the fact that in 1938 he protested

very sharply against having the education of the Hitler Youth during

their last 2 years from 16 to 18 taken over by the SA. He emphatically

opposed this plan and through personal intervention with Hitler

prevented the Führer decree in question from being applied in practice.

As for his attitude toward the SS, we know from the testimony of the

witness Gustav Hoepken, who was heard here on 28 May 1946, and from the

affidavit of the witness Maria Hoepken, Schirach Document Book Number 3,

that Schirach always feared he was being shadowed and spied upon by the

SS in Vienna. He always had an uncomfortable feeling because at the

beginning of his activity in Vienna a permanent deputy had been

appointed for him in his capacity as Reich Governor (Reichsstatthalter)

and Reich Defense Commissioner in the person, of all things, of a higher

SS leader, a certain Dr. Delbrügge; he was, as Schirach knew, closely

associated with the Reichsführer SS who, as has been proved, proposed to

Hitler in 1943 that Schirach should be imprisoned for defeatism and

brought before the Peoples’ Court, which meant in practice that Himmler

would have had Schirach hanged. These facts alone are already proof of

the real relationship between the Defendant Von Schirach and the SS, and

it will be understood why Schirach finally refused even the police

protection squad assigned to him and preferred to entrust his personal

protection to a unit of the Wehrmacht which was not subordinate to the

order of Himmler. (See affidavit of Maria Hoepken in Schirach Document

Book Number 3.)

Another accusation which has been made against the Defendant Von

Schirach concerns his attitude in the Church question. This attitude

corresponds to the impression given by the present proceedings, and

while this issue is not given any prominence in the Indictment, it is

nevertheless of considerable importance as far as the appreciation of

Schirach’s personality is concerned.

Schirach himself, as well as his wife, always remained members of the

Church. To the foreign critic this circumstance may perhaps appear an

unimportant detail, but we Germans know what pressure was exerted upon

high-ranking Party officials in these very matters, and how few in his

position ventured to resist such pressure. Schirach was one of those

few. He was the one high-ranking Party Leader who constantly and

invariably punished with extreme severity any hostile interference and

outrages against the Church on the part of the Hitler Youth. He has also

been reproached for the fact that various songs were sung by the Hitler

Youth which contained offensive remarks about religious institutions,

but in this respect Schirach could with a clear conscience confirm on

his oath that partly he was unaware of those songs, which is quite

conceivable where an organization of 7 or 8 million members is involved;

on the other hand, certain songs now considered objectionable date back

to the Middle Ages and figured in the song book of the Wandervogel, a

former youth organization which the Prosecution surely does not propose

to condemn. Schirach has however especially pointed out that during the

years 1933 to 1936 several million youths from an entirely different

spiritual environment joined the Hitler Youth and that during the first

revolutionary years, that is, in the period of storm and stress of the

Movement, it was quite impossible to hear of and prevent all lapses of

this sort. Whenever Schirach did hear of such things he intervened and

remedied abuses of that kind, which after all represented offenses on

the part of isolated elements incapable of compromising the youth

organization as a whole.

It is Schirach’s conviction that the examination of evidence leaves no

doubt as to his conciliatory behavior in the matter of the Church, and

that he strove to establish proper relations of mutual respect between

the Church on the one hand and the Third Reich, and more especially the

Reich Youth Leadership, on the other hand, and to observe their

respective rights and competences. At his own request Schirach was

permitted by the Reich Minister of the Interior to take part in

conducting the Concordat negotiations with the Catholic Church in 1934,

because he hoped to achieve an agreement with the Catholic Church more

easily by his personal co-operation. He honestly endeavored to find a

formula for the settlement of the youth question by which agreement with

the Catholic Church could be possible. His moderation and good will in

this respect were frankly acknowledged by the representative of the

Catholic Church at that time. But everything was ultimately frustrated

by Hitler’s opposition and the complications created for these

negotiations by the events of 30 June 1934, the so-called Röhm Putsch.

With the Protestant Church, on the other hand, Schirach achieved an

agreement with the Reich Bishop, Dr. Müller, so that the incorporation

of the Protestant youth groups into the Hitler Youth was not attained by

constraint but by mutual agreement, not by breaking up these

associations by the State or the Party, as the Prosecution assumes, but

upon the initiative of the Protestant ecclesiastical head and in

complete agreement with him. It must be pointed out here that it was

always Schirach’s policy that no restrictions were to be imposed on

church services by the Youth Leadership, neither then nor later. On the

contrary, as he himself has testified and as was confirmed by the

witness Lauterbacher, Schirach emphatically stated in 1937 that he would

leave it to the churches to educate the younger generation according to

the spirit of their faith, and at the same time he ordered that, as a

principle, no Hitler Youth service was to be scheduled on Sundays during

the time of church services. He gave strict orders to the unit leaders

of the Hitler Youth not to schedule duties which might disturb church

services. If, however, in individual cases such interference did occur

and some religious authorities lodged complaints as the

cross-examination revealed, then the Defendant Schirach cannot be blamed

for this, nor does it alter the fact that he had every good intention.

During the Trial not a single case could be proved in which he stirred

up feeling against the Church or made antireligious statements; on the

contrary, at numerous rallies as submitted to the Tribunal in the

Schirach document book, he not only repeatedly opposed the allegation

that the Hitler Youth were enemies of the Church or atheists, but he

always positively impressed upon the leaders and members of the Hitler

Youth the necessity of fulfilling their obligation toward God; he would

not tolerate anyone in the Hitler Youth who did not believe in God;

every true teacher, he told them, must imbue youth with religious

feeling, since it was the basis of all educational activities; Hitler

Youth service and religious convictions could very well be associated

with each other and exist side by side; no Hitler Youth leader was to

engender conflicts of conscience whatsoever in his boys. Leave of

absence was to be granted to Hitler Youth members for religious

services, rites, _et cetera_. Such was Von Schirach’s point of view.

Whoever gives such instructions to his subleaders, and continues to do

so over and over again, can demand that he should not be judged an enemy

of the Church and an enemy of religious life. Incidentally, it is

interesting in this connection to note what such a reliable judge as

Nevile Henderson wrote in his oft-quoted book _Failure of a Mission_

about a speech which he heard Schirach deliver at the 1937 Reich Party

Rally, parts of which have been submitted in Schirach’s document book.

Henderson, who as Ambassador in Berlin knew German conditions

intimately, evidently expected that Baldur Schirach would speak against

the Church at the Reich Party Rally and would influence the young people

in the spirit of enmity to the Church, as was often done by other

leaders of the Party. Henderson writes, and I quote two sentences:

“That day, however, it was Von Schirach’s speech which ...

impressed me most, although it was quite short.... One part of

this speech surprised me when, addressing the boys, he said, ‘I

do not know if you are Protestants or Catholics, but that you

believe in God, that I do know.’”

And Henderson added:

“I had been under the impression that all references to religion

were discouraged among the Hitler Youth, and this seemed to me

to refute that imputation.”

What Schirach really thought with regard to religion, and in what sense

he influenced youth, is indicated not only by a statement he made on the

occasion of a speech before the teachers of the Adolf Hitler Schools at

Sonthofen, to the effect that Christ was the greatest leader in the

history of the world, but likewise by the small book, submitted to you

in evidence, entitled, _Christmas Gift of the War Welfare Service_. This

book, which was sent out in large numbers, was dedicated by Schirach to

the front-line soldiers who joined from the ranks of the Hitler Youth

movement in 1944, at a time when radicalism in all spheres of German

life could hardly become more pronounced.

Here also Schirach was an exception: You will find no swastika, no

picture of Hitler, no SA song in the book of Reichsleiter Von Schirach,

but among other things a distinctly Christian poem from Schirach’s own

pen, then a picture of a Madonna, and next to it a reproduction of a

painting by Van Gogh who, as is generally known, was strictly banned in

the Third Reich. Instead of inflammatory words, we find an exhortation

to a Christian way of thinking and the “Wessobrunner Gebet,” familiar as

the earliest Christian prayer in the German language. Bormann stormed

when he saw the pamphlet, but Schirach remained firm and refused to

withdraw the little book or alter it in any way.

The Defendant Von Schirach has been charged with having once undertaken

a hostile act against the Church, and with having thereby taken part in

the persecution of the Church. From a letter by Minister Lammers of 14

March 1941 (Document R-146), it appears that Schirach had proposed to

keep confiscated property at the disposal of the Gaue, and not to hand

it over to the Reich, but this case is no justification at all for

connecting the Defendant Von Schirach in some way or other with the

persecution of the Church. The case mentioned by the Prosecution does

not concern church property at all, but confiscated property of a Prince

Schwarzenberg in his Vienna palace. This affair therefore never had

anything to do with the Church. This is also confirmed unequivocally by

Minister Lammers’ letter of 14 March 1941 (R-146), which mentions only,

I quote, “a confiscation of the property (of persons) hostile to the

people and the State,” whereas Bormann’s far-reaching personal intention

becomes apparent and betrays his hostile attitude toward the Church when

he writes about “church properties (monastic possessions, and so forth)”

in his accompanying letter of 20 March 1941 referring to this case.

Moreover, the confiscation of Prince Schwarzenberg’s property was not

caused, pronounced, or carried out by Schirach. Schirach had nothing to

do with the confiscation as such; Schirach, however, in agreement with

the other Gauleiter of the Austrian NSDAP, and at their request,

personally applied to Hitler and asked that such confiscated property

should not be taken to the Reich and not be used on behalf of the Reich,

but that it should remain in Vienna. This suggestion met with approval.

Hitler complied with his request, the result of Schirach’s efforts being

that, when the confiscation was rescinded later on, the property could

be returned to the legitimate owner, whereas it would otherwise have

been lost by him. By acting thus, Schirach no doubt rendered a service

to the Gau of Vienna and to the owner of the property seized. This

instance surely cannot be construed as a charge against the Defendant

Von Schirach; on the contrary, it speaks in his favor just as the other

case where, disregarding Bormann, he intervened on behalf of Austrian

nuns and as a result brought about, by a direct order from Hitler, the

discontinuance from one day to the other of the whole project of

confiscating church and monastic property in the whole Reich.

If the Prosecution further undertakes to charge the Defendant Von

Schirach with the fact that the Vienna authorities subordinate to him

proposed to establish an Adolf Hitler School in the monastery of

Klosterneuburg in 1941, I must point out that even prior to the

requisitioning of this monastery, and entirely independently of

Schirach, the Vienna police and several Vienna courts had uncovered a

considerable number of criminal offenses in this monastery, furthermore

that the confiscation of part of the monastery seemed entirely justified

to the Defendant Von Schirach, since the very spacious rooms of this

religious establishment were not required for monastery purposes.

It should also be noted that the monastery, as can be seen from

documents submitted, did not file any protest with the Reich Minister of

the Interior against the decision to confiscate, and thereby recognized

the confiscation as legal, although it had been expressly informed in

the confiscation decree of the possibility of lodging a complaint.

Moreover, the confiscated quarters were afterward not used for the

establishment of an Adolf Hitler School, but for the Museum of

Historical Art (thus not for a Party establishment), which again

testifies to the fact that the confiscation decree had in no way been

issued because of a hostile attitude on the part of Schirach toward the

Church. Had it been Schirach’s object to attack the monastery because it

was an ecclesiastical institution, he would have included in the

confiscation the rooms used for religious ceremonies. These, however, he

strictly excluded.

Moreover, when appraising this case, attention should be paid to the

fact that the justification of the confiscation decree of 22 February

1941 displays remarkable reticence. The decree restricts itself to

justifying the confiscation by the fact that on the one hand Vienna

badly needed room and that on the other hand the premises confiscated

were not required for the purposes of the monastery. Not a single word

mentions or even suggests that criminal offenses had taken place in the

monastery, as recorded in a police report of 23 January 1941, which is

submitted to the Court. If this confiscation had been the result of a

hostile attitude of Schirach toward the Church, we could have been sure

that somehow or other reference would have been made to these criminal

offenses to justify the confiscation. At Schirach’s wish a monthly

indemnification was paid to the clergy who had occupied some of the

confiscated rooms, for which payment there existed no official

obligation whatever.

Defendant Von Schirach’s further behavior does not reveal any hostile

attitude toward the Church, particularly if one considers, when judging

this behavior, that during these years even a Reichsleiter was under

strong pressure by the Reich Chancellery and by Bormann, and that at

that time a considerable amount of courage was necessary to resist this

pressure and carry on a policy in opposition to the official Berlin

policy.

The witness Wieshofer of Vienna, who had the opportunity of watching

Schirach’s activities, confirmed before the Court that in Vienna

Schirach likewise strove to establish correct relations with the Church,

that he was always willing to listen to any complaints of the Cardinal

of Vienna and took severe measures against the excesses of individual

members of the Hitler Youth or Hitler Youth leaders. In Vienna he thus

displayed a policy toward the Church quite different from that which his

radical predecessor Bürckel had favored, and it is beyond doubt that

ecclesiastical circles in Vienna and the whole of the Viennese

population appreciated Schirach’s attitude toward the Church. This is

also confirmed by the witness Gustav Hoepken who was examined here and

who, by order of Schirach, held regular conferences with a Vienna

theologian, Professor Ens, in order to be able to inform the Defendant

Schirach of the wishes of the Church and the differences which had

arisen with ecclesiastical authorities. Unless he wished to expose

himself to the most serious danger, Schirach could do no more under the

prevailing political circumstances, which are described in the affidavit

of Maria Hoepken, Document Book Schirach Number 3.

I now turn to another point of the Indictment, to the question of the

concentration camps. The Prosecution has connected the defendant with

concentration camps, although not in the Indictment but during the

presentation of evidence; and the witness Alois Höllriegel, who was

questioned here, was asked in the witness box whether Schirach had ever

been inside the Mauthausen Concentration Camp. To this I should like to

remark that the Defendant Von Schirach mentioned his visit to Mauthausen

at his interrogation by the American Prosecution before the beginning of

the Trial; it would, therefore, not have been necessary to have this

visit confirmed again by the witness Höllriegel. He visited the

Mauthausen Concentration Camp in the year 1942, not in 1944, as the

witness Marsalek erroneously stated; the correct year, 1942, has been

confirmed by the witness Höllriegel and also by the witnesses Hoepken

and Wieshofer, from whom we heard that neither after 1942 nor at any

other time did Schirach visit other concentration camps. The visit to

Mauthausen in 1942 cannot implicate the defendant Schirach in the sense

of his having known, approved, and supported all the conditions and

atrocities in concentration camps. In 1942 he saw nothing in Mauthausen

which might have indicated such crimes. There were no gas chambers and

the like in 1942. At that time mass executions did not take place at

Mauthausen. The statements of the Defendant Von Schirach concerning his

impression of this camp appear quite plausible, because the testimony of

numerous witnesses who have been heard during the course of this Trial

has confirmed again and again that on the occasion of such official

visits, which had been announced previously, everything was carefully

prepared in order to show to the visitors only that which need not fear

the light of day. Maltreatment and torture were concealed during such

official visits in the same manner as arbitrary executions or cruel

experiments. This was the case at Mauthausen in 1942 and certainly also

at Dachau in 1935, where Schirach and the other visitors were shown only

orderly conditions, which at a superficial glance appeared to be better

than in some ordinary prisons.

As a result, Schirach only knew that since 1933 there were several

concentration camps in Germany where, as far as he knew, incorrigible

habitual criminals and political prisoners were confined. However, even

today Schirach is unable to believe that the mere knowledge of the

existence of concentration camps is in itself a punishable crime, since

he at no time did anything whatsoever to promote concentration camps,

never expressed his approval of this institution, never sent anybody to

a concentration camp, and would in any case never have been able to make

any changes in this institution or to prevent the existence of

concentration camps. Schirach’s influence was always too small for that.

As Reich Youth Leader, of course, he had nothing to do with

concentration camps in the first place, and it was lucky for Schirach

that in his entire Vienna Gau district there was not a single

concentration camp. His relations with concentration camps were

therefore limited to repeated attempts to have people released from

them, and it is after all significant that his sole visit to the

Concentration Camp Mauthausen resulted in his exerting his influence to

obtain the ultimate release of inhabitants of Vienna who were imprisoned

there.

May it please the Tribunal, I do not want to go again into many details

which have played a larger or smaller part in the presentation of

evidence for the case of Schirach. In the interest of saving time I

shall not deal more specifically with his alleged connection with

Rosenberg or Streicher, nor with his alleged collaboration in the slave

labor program, in which connection not even the slightest participation

of the Defendant Schirach could be proved, nor with a telephone

conversation which has been used by the Prosecution and which allegedly

took place between one of the Viennese officials and an SS

Standartenführer regarding the compulsory labor of the Jews, about which

Von Schirach knew nothing at all.

But I should like to insert a short remark about one subject which arose

particularly in connection with the case of Rosenberg, that is, a brief

explanation concerning the Hay Action by which thousands of children in

the Eastern combat zone were collected and brought partly to Poland and

partly to Germany. The apparent aim of this operation, as far as

Schirach could see from the documents presented here, was to collect

children who were in the zone of operations, that is, immediately behind

the front and wandering around without their parents, with a view to

giving them professional training and work so that they should be saved

from physical and moral neglect.

The Defendant Von Schirach doubts whether this can be looked upon as a

crime against humanity, or as a war crime; but one thing is certain,

that the Defendant Von Schirach did not know anything of that affair at

the time. He was not the competent authority. That entire affair was

handled by Army Group Center in collaboration with the Ministry for the

Eastern Occupied Territories, and, of course, it is quite plausible that

neither the Eastern Ministry nor the Army Group Center saw fit to

approach the Gauleiter of Vienna in order to get his approval of that

action, or even to notify him about it.

The only thing which, a considerable time later, came to the attention

of the Defendant Von Schirach and may have some bearing on that, the Hay

Action, was an incidental report by Reich Youth Leader Axmann that so

and so many thousand youths had been brought to the Junkers works at

Dessau as apprentices.

The Defendant Von Schirach was anxious to clear up this matter in view

of his former office as Reich Youth Leader, and he wishes to make it

quite clear that even after leaving that office he would of course never

have undertaken anything against the interests of youth.

May I add another remark here concerning the letter which the Defendant

Von Schirach sent to Reichsleiter Bormann after the murder of Heydrich,

in which he suggested reprisal measures to Bormann in the form of a

terror attack upon an English center of culture? That letter was

actually sent by the defendant to Bormann. He acknowledges it. I have to

point out at the very beginning that fortunately the suggestion remained

a suggestion, and it was never carried out. The defendant, however, has

told us that at that time he was very upset by the assassination of

Heydrich, and it was clear to him that a revolt of the population in

Bohemia would necessarily lead to a catastrophe for the German armies in

Russia, and in his capacity as Gauleiter of Vienna he had considered it

his duty to undertake something to protect the rear of the German army

fighting in Russia. And that explains that teletype to Bormann in 1942

(Document 3877) which, as I have already pointed out, fortunately was

not acted upon.

May it please the Tribunal, I shall proceed with my statement, the

middle of Page 26.

I shall not deal in detail with the Adolf Hitler Schools which were

founded by Schirach, nor with the Fifth Column which was somehow, quite

wrongly, connected with the Hitler Youth, although nothing definite

could be charged to the defendant. I shall not go into either the

repeated efforts on behalf of peace undertaken by the Defendant Schirach

and his friend Dr. Colin Ross, nor shall I discuss the merits of the

defendant with reference to the evacuation of children to the rural

areas, which took millions of children from bomb-endangered districts

during the war into more quiet zones and thus saved their lives and

health.

The Defendant Von Schirach has already talked about all these affairs in

detail himself, and I should therefore like to refer to his own

statements, which you will consider in your judgment.

As counsel for the Defendant Von Schirach, I shall discuss only one more

problem here, namely Schirach’s opinion and attitude concerning the

Jewish question. Schirach has admitted here on the witness stand that he

has been a convinced National Socialist, and thus also an anti-Semite

from his earliest youth. He has also made clear to us what he understood

by anti-Semitism during those years. He thought of the exclusion of the

Jews from civil service and of the limitation of Jewish influence in

cultural life and perhaps also in economic life, to a certain extent.

But that was all which in his opinion should be undertaken against the

Jews, and this was in accordance with the suggestion which he had

already made as leader of the students’ organization for the

introduction of a quota system for students. The defendant’s decree

concerning the treatment of Jewish youth is, for example, also important

in establishing his attitude (Schirach Document Number 136). This is a

decree in which he expressly orders that Jewish youth organizations

should have the right and the opportunity to practice freely within the

limitations imposed upon them. It says that they were not to be

disturbed in their own life.

“In its youth the Jewish community shall already today take up

that secluded but internally unrestrained special position which

at some future time the entire Jewish community will be given in

the German State and in German economy.”

Those are the very words of that decree. Obviously Schirach was not at

all thinking about pogroms, bloody persecutions of the Jews, and the

like; rather did he believe at that time that the anti-Semitic movement

had already achieved its aim by the anti-Jewish legislative measures of

the years 1933-34, thereby eliminating Jewish influence as far as it

seemed unhealthy to him. He was therefore surprised and very alarmed

when the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated in 1935, which formulated a

policy of complete exclusion of the Jewish population and carried it out

with barbaric severity. Schirach in no way took part in the planning of

these laws; he has nothing whatsoever to do with their content and their

formulation. That has been proved here.

When on 10 November 1938 he heard about the pogrom against the Jews and

about the brutal excesses which were staged by Goebbels and his fanatic

clique his indignation became known throughout the entire youth

movement. The evidence proved this also. We have heard from the witness

Lauterbacher how Schirach reacted to the report of these excesses: He

immediately called his assistants together and gave them the strictest

orders that the Hitler Youth must be kept out of such actions under all

circumstances. He at once had the leaders of the Hitler Youth in all

German cities notified by telephone to the same effect and warned every

subordinate that he would hold him personally responsible if any

excesses should occur in the Hitler Youth.

But even after November 1938 Schirach never considered the possibility

that Hitler was contemplating the extermination of the Jews. On the

contrary, he only heard it mentioned that the Jews were to be evacuated

from Germany into other states, that they should be transported to

Poland and settled there, at worst in ghettos, but more probably in a

closed settlement area. When Schirach in July 1940 received Hitler’s

order to take over the Gau of Vienna, Hitler himself also talked to him

along the same lines, namely, that he, Hitler, would have the Jews

brought from Vienna into the Government General; and even today Schirach

has no doubt that Hitler himself was not thinking about the so-called

“final solution” of the Jewish question at that time, 1940, in terms of

the extermination of the Jews. We learn from the Hossbach minutes and

other evidence of this Trial that Hitler was planning the evacuation of

Poland already in 1937, but that he decided on the extermination of the

Jewish people only in 1941 or 1942.

Schirach had nothing at all to do with the evacuation of the Jews from

Vienna, as is alleged by the Prosecution; the execution of this measure

was exclusively in the hands of the Reich Security Main Office and the

Vienna branch of that office, and it is known that SS Gruppenführer

Brunner of Vienna has in the meantime been sentenced to death for that

very reason. The only order which Schirach received and carried out

concerning the Viennese Jews was to report to Hitler in 1940 how many

Jews there were still left in Vienna, and he made this report in a

letter of December 1940 where he gave the figure of the Viennese Jews

for 1940 as 60,000. It will be remembered that Minister Lammers answered

this letter from the Defendant Schirach by a letter dated 3 December

1940 (1950-PS), which shows with all clarity that it was not Schirach

who ordered the evacuation of the Viennese Jews to the Government

General but Hitler himself, and that again it was not Schirach who

carried out this measure but the Reichsführer SS Himmler, who delegated

this task to his Vienna office. It must therefore be stated here

categorically that Schirach is in no way responsible for the deportation

of the Jews from Vienna; he did not carry out this program and he did

not initiate it; when he came to Vienna in the summer of 1940 as

Gauleiter, the majority of the Viennese Jews had already voluntarily

emigrated or had been forcibly evacuated from Vienna, a fact which was

confirmed by the Defendant Seyss-Inquart. The remaining 60,000 Jews who

were still there at the beginning of Schirach’s time in Vienna were

deported from there by the SS without his participation and without his

responsibility.

Schirach did make the well-known speech in Vienna in September 1942,

where he stated that every Jew working in Europe was a danger to

European culture. Schirach furthermore said in this speech that if it

was desired to reproach him with the fact that he had deported tens of

thousands of Jews into the Eastern ghetto from this city, which had once

been the metropolis of Judaism, he would but answer that he considered

this an active contribution to European culture. That is how this

passage reads. Schirach has openly and courageously admitted that he

actually expressed himself in this manner at that time, and expressed

his regret by stating:

“I cannot take back this wicked statement; I must take the

responsibility for it. I spoke these words, which I sincerely

regret.”

Should the Tribunal see in these words a legally punishable crime

against humanity, Schirach will have to make atonement for this single

anti-Semitic remark which can be attributed to him, though it was merely

a spoken word and did not have any harmful result. Schirach’s attitude

in this respect does not exempt the Tribunal from its duty to verify

carefully what Schirach actually did; furthermore, under what

circumstances he made this isolated remark, and finally whether Schirach

also made any other spiteful remarks against the Jews or committed any

malicious acts against the Jewish race as a whole.

The foremost question is: What did Schirach really do? The reply to

this, emerging from the revelations of this Trial, can only be: Apart

from the fact that he made this isolated anti-Semitic remark in his

speech in Vienna in September 1942, he has not committed any crime

against the Jews. He had no competence in the question of the

deportation of the Vienna Jews, he did not participate in it at all, and

having too little power he could not have prevented it in any case. It

is just as the Prosecution incidentally stated: He boastfully attributed

to himself an action which in reality he had never committed and, in

view of his entire attitude, he never could have committed.

What, however prompted Schirach to make this remark in his Vienna

speech? How did he come to attribute to himself a deed and charge

himself with an action which he had obviously never committed? Here too

the answer is given by the results of the evidence in the Trial: It

demonstrates what a very difficult position Schirach had in Vienna.

Without giving any reason, Hitler dismissed him as Reich Youth Leader,

presumably because he no longer trusted him. From year to year Hitler’s

fear was growing lest the young people might stand behind Schirach and

become alienated from him, Hitler, to the same degree that the black

wall of his SS was isolating him from the people. Hitler possibly saw in

his Youth Leader the personification of the coming generation which

thought in world-wide terms, whose feelings were human and who felt

themselves more and more bound to those precepts of true morality which

Hitler had long ago jettisoned for himself and his national leadership,

because they had long since ceased to be concepts of true morality for

him but mere slogans of a meaningless propaganda. This feeling of

Hitler’s may have been the deeper reason why he dismissed Schirach as

Youth Leader suddenly in the summer of 1940, without word of

explanation, and put him in the especially difficult position of

Gauleiter in Vienna, the city which he, Hitler, hated from the bottom of

his heart, even while he spoke of his “Austrian fatherland.”

In Vienna Schirach’s position was extremely complicated. Wherever he

went he was shadowed and spied upon, his administrative activity there

was sharply criticized, he was reproached for neglecting the interests

of the Party in Vienna, for almost never being seen at Party meetings,

and for not making any political speeches. I refer in this connection to

the affidavit of Maria Hoepken, Schirach Document Book Number 3. The

Berlin Party Chancellery accepted any complaints the Vienna Party

members made about their new Gauleiter with satisfaction, and this fact

alone can explain the unfortunate speech Schirach made in September

1942, which was diametrically opposed to the attitude he had always

maintained concerning the Jewish question. After the interrogation of

the witness Gustav Hoepken here in this courtroom there can be no doubt

as to how the Vienna speech came about, for it reveals that Schirach had

expressly charged his press officer Günther Kaufmann to emphasize this

particular point when telephoning his report of the Vienna speech to the

German News Agency in Berlin, because he, Schirach—I quote—“had to

make a concession to Bormann in this respect.” Schirach himself stressed

this point in the course of his interrogation with the statement that

out of false loyalty he had morally identified himself with these acts

of Hitler and Himmler. This ugly speech which Schirach made in September

1942 is, however, in another sense a very valuable point in favor of

Schirach: He speaks of a “transfer of the Jews to the ghettos of the

East.” Had Schirach known at that time that the Viennese Jews were to be

sent away in order to be murdered in an extermination camp, he would in

view of the purpose of this speech doubtless not have spoken of an

Eastern ghetto to which the Jews had been sent, and would have reported

the extermination of the Viennese Jews; but even at this time, in the

autumn of 1942, he never had the slightest suspicion that Hitler

proposed to murder the Jews. That he would never have approved and never

accepted; his anti-Semitism at no time went so far.

Schirach also frankly stated here that at that time he approved of

Hitler’s plan to settle the Jews in Poland, not because he was inspired

by anti-Semitism or hatred of the Jews, but by the reasonable

consideration that in view of existing conditions it was in the Jews’

own interest to leave Vienna and be taken to Poland, because the Jews

would not in the long run have been able to stay in Vienna under the

Hitler regime without being exposed to increasingly serious persecution.

As Schirach declared on 24 May 1946, considering Goebbels’ temperament

it always seemed possible that incidents like those of November 1938

might be repeated from one day to the other, and under such conditions

of legal insecurity he could not visualize the existence of the Jewish

population in Germany. He thought that the Jews would be safer in a

restricted settlement area of the Government General than in Germany and

Austria, where they were exposed to the whims of the Propaganda Minister

who, indeed, had been the main supporter of radical anti-Semitism in

Germany. Schirach was well aware of this fact. He could not shut his

eyes to the realization that the drive against the Jews in Germany

obviously became more drastic, more fanatic, and more violent every day.

This conception of the Vienna speech of September 1942 and the true

cause of its genesis coincide with the statements of the Defendant

Schirach at the meeting of the city councillors of Vienna on 6 June 1942

(Document Number 3886-PS), to the effect that in the late summer and

autumn of that year all Jews would be expelled from the city, and

likewise with the file note of Reichsleiter Bormann of 2 October 1940

(USSR-142), according to which, at a social meeting at Hitler’s home,

Schirach had remarked that he still had more than 50,000 Jews left in

Vienna which the Governor General of Poland must take over from him.

This remark was caused by Schirach’s embarrassing situation at that

time. Hitler, on the one hand, kept insisting on the expulsion of the

Jews from Vienna, while on the other hand Governor General Frank was

reluctant to receive them in the Government General. This disagreement

was evidently the reason for Schirach’s discussing this fact at the

above-mentioned meeting on 2 October 1940, in order to avoid renewed

reproaches by Hitler. Personally he was in no way interested in the

removal of the Viennese Jews, as was proved by the testimony of the

witness Gustav Hoepken regarding the conference between Schirach and

Himmler in November 1943.

I should like to add a word here concerning that discussion. During that

conference with Himmler, Schirach presented the point of view that the

Jews might be left in Vienna, especially since they were wearing the

Star of David anyway. That has been testified to by the witness Hoepken

as being a statement made by Schirach during the conversation. However,

Hitler demanded the expulsion of the Jews from Vienna and Himmler

insisted on having it carried out.

The Prosecution thought it possible to charge Schirach with having made

another malicious anti-Semitic remark in connection with a speech which

he supposedly made in late December 1938, certainly before the spring of

1939, at a students’ meeting at Heidelberg. Across the Neckar River he

pointed to the old university town of Heidelberg where several

burned-out synagogues were the silent witnesses to the anti-Semitic

activities of the students of Heidelberg. I refer to the affidavit of

Ziemer, in which “the stout little Reich Student Leader”—as it is

stated literally—is said to have approved and commended the pogroms of

9 November 1938 as a heroic act. This charge, as already mentioned, is

supported by the declaration under oath of a certain Gregor Ziemer.

However, there can be no doubt that this statement of Ziemer’s is false.

Ziemer never belonged to the German student movement or the Hitler

Youth, and obviously was not personally present at the student assembly

in question. The affidavit does not state from what source he is

supposed to have obtained his knowledge. However, that his claim is

false is already proved by his description of physical appearance when

he speaks of a “stout little student leader”; for this does not at all

resemble Schirach. Perhaps it would to some extent apply to his

successor, who was Reich Student Leader at the end of 1938, but it

certainly was not Schirach. As is known, he had already in 1934 given

the office of Reich Student Leader back into the hands of the Führer’s

deputy, after he himself had in the meantime been appointed Reich Youth

Leader. Schirach did not make a speech at the end of 1938 or at any

other time before Heidelberg students, and by the affidavit of the

witness Maria Hoepken (Schirach Document Book Number 3) it has been

clearly proved that at the time stated Schirach was not in Heidelberg at

all. Schirach has also confirmed this under oath and his own statement

can lay claim to credibility because he has not whitewashed anything for

which he was responsible, and he has not falsely denied anything, but on

the contrary has accounted for all his actions with courage and

truthfulness during his entire examination.

Still another fact decisively confirms the claim that the Ziemer

affidavit is untrue, at any rate in regard to the person of Schirach. In

the presentation of evidence it happened to be stated by chance how

Schirach reacted to the November pogroms of the year 1938. The witness

Lauterbacher has informed us here, as already mentioned at another

point, that Schirach on 10 November 1938 condemned most vehemently the

events of 9 November 1938 in the presence of his co-workers, and

declared that he felt ashamed for the others and for the whole Party.

The 9th of November 1938, Schirach said, would go down in Germany

history as a unique disgrace of German culture of which we would never

be able to cleanse ourselves. Such a thing might have happened among an

uncivilized people, but it should never have occurred among us Germans

who consider ourselves to be a highly civilized people. The youth

leaders, Schirach explained at that time, had to prevent such excesses

under all circumstances. He did not wish to hear anything like this

about his own organization, either now or in the future. The Hitler

Youth must be kept outside such things under all circumstances. These

are sworn statements by the witness Hoepken. By a telephone message from

Berlin, Schirach had all the offices of the Hitler Youth informed in the

same terms. If Schirach in November 1938 condemned and criticized in

such an extremely sharp manner the events of 9 November 1938, it is

impossible for him to have praised at about the same time the bloody

acts which had been committed and thus to have incited the Heidelberg

students, and the question therefore arises as to why not a single

participant at that student meeting in Heidelberg was brought here as a

witness instead of one who could only testify from hearsay.

Incidentally, the Prosecution did not revert to this alleged Heidelberg

speech during cross-examination, thereby acknowledging Schirach’s own

presentation of the facts to be correct.

It is also a very significant fact that the Hitler Youth did not

participate in the excesses of 9 November 1938, nor did they commit any

excesses of this sort either before or afterward. The Hitler Youth at

that time was the strongest Party organization. It comprised some seven

or eight million members, and in spite of that not one single case has

been proved where the Hitler Youth participated in such crimes against

humanity, although its members were mainly of an age which, according to

experience, is only too easily tempted to participate in excesses and

acts of brutality. The only exception which has been claimed so far

concerns the testimony of the French woman Ida Vasseau, who is said to

be the manager of an Old People’s Home in Lemberg and is supposed to

have claimed, according to the report of the Commission, Document Number

USSR-6, that the Hitler Youth had been given children from the ghetto in

Lemberg whom they used as living targets for their shooting practice.

This single exception, however, which so far has been claimed but not

proved, could not be cleared up in any way, particularly not in respect

of whether members of the Hitler Youth had really been involved. But

even if there had been such a single case among the eight million

members during 10 or 15 long years, this could not in any way prove that

Baldur von Schirach had exercised an inciting influence, and that, if I

may add this here, at a time when he was no longer Reich Youth Leader.

THE PRESIDENT: We will adjourn now.

[_A recess was taken._]

DR. SAUTER: If the Tribunal please, I shall proceed from Page 36 of my

statement. Let us just examine all the speeches and articles which Von

Schirach wrote as Reich Youth Leader, and which are in the possession of

the Tribunal in the Schirach document book. They extend over a long

period of years, yet they do not contain a single word inciting to race

hatred, preaching hatred of Jews, exhorting youth to commit acts of

violence, or defending such acts. If it has been possible to keep the

members of the Hitler Youth, who numbered millions, clear of such

excesses, this fact also goes to prove that the leaders endeavored to

imbue the younger generation with a spirit of tolerance, love of one’s

neighbors, and respect of human dignity.

Just what Von Schirach thought about the treatment of the Jewish

question is clearly evident from the scene with occurred in the spring

of 1943 at Obersalzberg, which is also described in the affidavit of the

witness Maria Hoepken (Document Book Schirach Number 3). In this case I

refer to the scene where Schirach had an eyewitness describe to Hitler

at his home at Obersalzberg how he had witnessed with his own eyes at

night from a hotel window in Amsterdam the manner in which the Gestapo

deported hundreds of Dutch Jewesses. Schirach himself could not dare at

the time to bring such matters to Hitler’s attention; a decree by

Bormann had expressly prohibited the Gauleiter from doing this. Schirach

therefore tried through the mediation of a third person, who had been a

witness himself, to gain Hitler’s approval of a mitigation in the

treatment of the Jewish question. No success was achieved; Hitler

dismissed it all bluntly with the remark that this was all

sentimentality. Because of this intervention on behalf of the Dutch Jews

the situation of the Defendant Von Schirach had become so critical that

he preferred to leave Obersalzberg immediately, early in the morning of

the following day, and from that time on, Hitler was in principle no

longer accessible to Schirach.

This intervention of Schirach for a milder treatment of the Jewish

question perhaps also contributed to the fact that Hitler, a few months

later, in the summer of 1943, seriously considered having Schirach

arrested and brought before the Peoples’ Court, for the sole reason that

Schirach had dared, in a letter to Reichsleiter Bormann, to describe the

war as a national disaster for Germany.

In any case all this shows that Schirach, as much as he was able,

advocated moderation in the Jewish question in a manner which endangered

his own position and existence. In spite of the fact that he was an

anti-Semite—and just because of this it deserves attention—he

withstood all pressure from Berlin and refused to have an anti-Semitic

special edition published in the official journal of the Hitler Youth,

while he had published his own special editions for an understanding

with England and France and for a more humane treatment of the Eastern

nations. It is no less worthy of consideration that Schirach, in

conjunction with his friend Dr. Colin Ross, endeavored to attain the

emigration of the Jews into neutral foreign countries in order to save

them from being deported to a Polish ghetto.

The Prosecution has endeavored to substantiate its allegation that the

Defendant Von Schirach bears a certain share of the responsibility for

the pogroms against Jews which occurred in Poland and Russia, by trying

to use against him the so-called “Reports on Experiences and Situation,”

which were regularly sent by the SS to the Commissioner for Defense of

the Reich in the Military Administrative District XVII. In fact it must

be said that if—and I emphasize, if—Schirach had at that time had

cognizance of these regular “Reports on Experiences and Situation by the

Operational Groups (Einsatzgruppen) of the Security Police and the

Security Service in the East,” then this fact would indeed constitute

for him a grave moral and political charge. Then he could not be spared

the accusation that he must have been aware of the fact that, apart from

the military operations in the East, extremely horrible mass murders of

Communists and Jews had also taken place. The picture of Von Schirach’s

character which we have so far, who was described even by the

Prosecution as a “cultured man,” would be tainted very materially if Von

Schirach had actually seen and read these reports. For then he would

have known that in Latvia and Lithuania, in White Ruthenia and in Kiev,

mass murders had taken place, quite obviously without any legal

proceedings of any kind and without sentence having been passed.

What has, however, actually been proved by the evidence? The reports

referred to were sent, among dozens of other offices, also to that of

the “Reich Commissioner for Defense in Military Administrative District

XVII” and, moreover, with the specific address “attention of Government

Councillor Dr. Hoffmann” or “attention of Government Councillor Dr.

Fischer.” From this style of address and from the way in which these

reports were initialed at the office of the “Commissioner for Defense of

the Reich,” it can be established beyond question that Schirach did not

have an opportunity of seeing these reports and that he obtained no

knowledge of them in any other way either.

Schirach, it will be remembered, held three extensive offices in Vienna:

as Reich Governor (Reichsstatthalter) and Reich Defense Commissioner he

was the chief of the whole State administration; as Lord Mayor he was

the head of the municipal administration; and as Gauleiter of Vienna he

was the head of the local Party machinery. It is only natural that

Schirach could not fulfill all these three tasks by himself, especially

since in 1940 he had come from a completely different set of tasks, and

first had to make himself acquainted with the scope of work in State

administration and in municipal administration. He therefore had a

permanent deputy for each of his three tasks, and for the affairs of the

State administration, which interests us here, this was the

Regierungspräsident of Vienna. This official, Dr. Delbrügge, was to

handle the current affairs of the State administration completely on his

own initiative. Schirach occupied himself only with such matters of

State administration as were forwarded to him by his permanent deputy,

the Regierungspräsident, in written form, or about which his deputy

reported to him orally.

Now, if this had been the case with regard to the afore-mentioned

“Experience and Situation Reports,” then this would have somehow been

noted on the documents in question. However, on the “Experience and

Situation Reports of the SS” submitted here there is not a single note

which indicates that these reports were shown to the Defendant Von

Schirach or that he was informed about them. This will readily be

understood without further explanation because, after all, the

experiences which the Police and the SD had accumulated in the partisan

struggles in Poland and Russia were completely inconsequential for the

Vienna administration; therefore there was not the least cause to inform

the Defendant Baldur von Schirach of these reports in any way, since he

was very much overburdened anyhow with administrative matters of all

kinds.

This conclusion, Gentlemen, rests primarily not only on the testimony

under oath of the defendant here in Court, but also on that of the two

witnesses Hoepken and Wieshofer, who, one as chief of the Central Office

and the other as adjutant of the defendant, were able to give the most

exact information about conditions in Vienna. It is certain that these

“Experience and Situation Reports” never came into the distribution

center of the Central Office in Vienna, but only into the distribution

center of the Regierungspräsident, and that Hoepken, as chief of the

Central Office, as well as Wieshofer, as adjutant of the defendant,

likewise had no previous knowledge of these reports but saw them for the

first time here in the courtroom during their questioning. And I would

like to insert here that the two officials of the Defendant Von Schirach

who were mentioned by name, Dr. Fischer and the other one, were entirely

unaware of them. In any case the result, as has been proved by the file

notes which are on the documents, is that Schirach did not have any

knowledge whatsoever of these reports, and that he is not coresponsible

for the atrocities described therein, and therefore cannot be criminally

charged on the basis of these activity reports.

May it please the Tribunal, in judging the personality of Schirach, his

behavior during the last weeks in Vienna is also not without importance.

For Schirach it was a matter of course not to carry out the various

insane orders which came from Berlin at that time. He absolutely

condemned the lynching of enemy aviators which was ordered by Bormann,

and likewise the order to hang defeatists without mercy, regardless of

whether they were men or women. His summary court was never even in

session, and did not pronounce a single death sentence. No blood is on

his hands. On the other hand, for example, he did everything in order to

protect from the excited mob enemy aviators who had made an emergency

landing and again, as we have heard from the witness Wieshofer, he

immediately sent out his own car in order to bring to safety American

aviators who had parachuted. Thereby he again placed himself in

deliberate opposition to an order of Bormann that such aviators were not

to be protected against lynching by the civilian population. Nor did he

pay any attention to the order that Vienna was to be defended to the

last man, or that in Vienna bridges and churches and residential

sections were to be destroyed, and he emphatically refused compliance

with the order to form partisan units in civilian clothing or to

continue the hopeless struggle in a criminal manner with the aid of the

Werewolf organization. He turned down such demands out of his sense of

duty, all the more since this would have caused him to violate

international law.

The characterization of the Defendant Von Schirach would be incomplete

if we were not also to recall at this moment the declaration which he

deposed here on the morning of 24 May 1946. I am speaking of that

declaration in which he described Hitler as an unmitigated murderer,

here before the whole German people and before the entire world public.

Already last year Schirach made declarations which show his feeling of

responsibility and his preparedness to answer fully for his actions and

those of his subordinates. This was the case on 5 June 1945, for

example, when he was hiding in the Tyrol and heard over the radio that

all Party leaders were to be brought before an Allied court. Schirach

thereupon gave himself up immediately, and in his letter to the American

local commander stated he was doing so in order to protect other people,

who had only executed his orders, from being called to account for his

actions. He surrendered voluntarily, although the British radio had

already announced the news of his death, and although Schirach could

have hoped to remain undiscovered in his hiding place. This behavior

deserves consideration in judging the personality of a defendant.

The same feeling of responsibility was then shown by Schirach in the

autumn of 1945 when he was heard by the Prosecution. He believed at that

time that his successor Axmann had been killed, as he had been reported

to be dead. In spite of this, Schirach did not attempt to put the

responsibility on his successor; on the contrary, he expressly stated

that he was assuming full responsibility also for the time his successor

was in office, as well as for what had been done under his successor in

the Reich Youth Leadership. The keystone in this line of conduct is

furnished by the statement which Schirach made here on 24 May 1946,

which went out from this courtroom to the whole world, to all the German

lands, down to the last farm, down to the last workman’s hut.

May it please the Tribunal: Any man may err, he may even make mistakes

that he later may not understand himself. Schirach also has erred; he

brought up the younger generation for a man whom he for many years held

to be unimpeachable and whom he must now brand as a diabolical criminal.

In his idealism and out of loyalty he remained faithful and true to his

oath to a man who deceived and cheated him and the youth of Germany and

who, as we learned here from Speer, up to his last breath placed his own

interests higher than the existence and the happiness of 80 million

people.

Schirach is perhaps the one defendant who not only clearly realized his

mistakes, however they may be regarded, but who confessed to them most

honestly and who through his plain speaking prevented the creation of a

Hitler legend in the future. Such a defendant must be given

consideration for trying to repair as far as he can the damage which he

caused in good faith.

Schirach had tried to do that; he took pains to open the eyes of our

people about the “Führer” in whom, together with millions of Germans, he

saw for many years the deliverer of the fatherland and the guarantor of

its future. He publicly rendered an account which the German people are

entitled to ask of every subleader since Hitler committed suicide. He

did this so that foreign countries could see how the conditions of the

last six years had come about in Germany and just who was responsible

for them.

But above all, the former Youth Leader, in making his statement on 24

May 1946, desired to tell the youth of Germany openly that so far, quite

unknowingly and with the best of intentions, he had led them astray and

that now they must take another path if the German people and German

culture are not to perish. In doing so Schirach did not think of himself

nor of his life’s work which had been destroyed; he was thinking of the

youth of today, which not only faces the ruins of our cities and

dwellings, but also wanders about among the wreckage of its former

ideals; he was thinking of German youth, which is in dire need of new

guidance and which must base its future existence on another foundation.

Schirach hopes that the entire youth of Germany has heard his words.

What was particularly valuable in his confession of 24 May 1946 was his

assurance that he alone takes the guilt for youth, just as he formerly

assumed command. If this point of view is acknowledged as being right,

and if the necessary conclusions are drawn therefrom, this would be a

valuable result of this Trial for our German youth.

May it please the Tribunal, I am now coming to the end of my survey of

the case of Von Schirach. In the treatment of this case I desisted from

making general statements, and especially those of a political nature.

Rather, I confined myself to the appreciation of the personality of the

defendant, his actions and his motives.

In this connection I should like to add, to complete the picture, that

these considerations and this appreciation by the Defense have shown

that the Defendant Von Schirach is not guilty in the sense of the

Indictment and cannot be punished, for he did not commit a punishable

act, since you as judges will not judge political guilt but rather

criminal guilt in the sense of the penal code.

At the end of my remarks in the case of Von Schirach I should like to

have the privilege of making a few general statements, not immediately

connected with the personality of Schirach, but suggesting themselves to

a German defense counsel at the end of this Trial.

May it please the Tribunal, you are the highest tribunal of our times;

the power of the whole world stands behind you; you represent the four

mightiest nations on earth; hundreds of millions of men, not only in the

defeated countries, but also in the victorious nations listen to your

opinions and anxiously await your judgment, ready to be taught by you

and to follow your advice.

This high authority affords you, Gentlemen, an opportunity of doing much

good through your verdict and particularly through the statement of the

basis for the judgment, in order that out of today’s disaster the way to

a better future may be found for the benefit of your own people and for

the good of the German people.

Today, Gentlemen of the Tribunal, Germany lies beaten to the ground, a

poor people, the poorest of all. The German cities are destroyed; German

industry is smashed to pieces; on the shoulders of the German people

rests a national debt representing many times the entire national wealth

and spelling want and poverty, hunger and slavery, for many generations

for the German people if your peoples do not help us. The findings

supporting your verdict will in many respects point the way and give the

help needed to emerge from this desperate plight.

To be sure, for reasons of sentiment it may be hard for you to consider

this point of view and to take it into account when you think of the

misfortune which the past six years also brought to your own countries.

It becomes doubly hard, because for months this Trial has revealed

nothing but crimes, crimes committed for a great number of years by a

German tyrant misusing Germans and the name of this same German people

of whose future you as judges are now asked to think benevolently and

whom you are now required to help.

May it please the Tribunal: Hitler is dead—with him his tools who in

these years committed crimes without number tyrannizing Germany and

nearly all of Europe and disgracing the German name for generations to

come. The German people on the other hand live, and must be allowed to

live if half a universe is not to fall into ruins.

With this Trial and during this epoch, the German people are undergoing

a very serious operation. It must not bring death; it must bring

recovery. Your verdict can and must make a contribution in that

direction, so that in the future the world may not see in every German a

criminal, but revert again to the concept of Professor Arnold Nash of

the University of Chicago, who a few days ago, when questioned about the

purpose of his present trip to Europe, replied: “Every scientist has two

fatherlands, his own and Germany.” These words ought to be a warning

also for all of those irresponsible critics who even today see it as

their task, with propaganda means of every sort, to stir up feeling

against everything German and to tell the world that at least every

other person in Germany is a criminal.