Newsgroups: alt.revisionism Subject: Holocaust Almanac: Schacht's Hitler Followup-To: alt.revisionism Organization: The Nizkor Project (CANADA) Keywords: Schacht "During direct examination ... Schacht demonstrated that his reputation for articulateness, adroit phraseology, and cutting sarcasm was well deserved. He left no doubt of his sentiments toward Hitler and the Nazis: `Only one thing did most of the leaders of the party have in common with the old Teutons, and that was drinking,' he said. `Excessive drinking was a main part of the Nazi ideology.' Hitler, Schacht continued, `did not have sufficient school education, but he read an enormous amount later, and acquired a wide knowledge. He juggled with that knowledge in a masterly manner in all debates, discussions, and speeches. `No doubt he was a man of genius in certain respects. He had sudden ideas of which nobody else had thought and which at times were useful in solving great difficulties, sometimes with astounding simplicity, sometimes, however, with equally astounding brutality. `He was a mass psychologist of really diabolical genius. While I myself and several others were never captivated in personal conversations, still he had a very peculiar influence on other people, and particularly he was able -- in spite of his screeching and occasionally breaking voice -- to stir up the utmost overwhelming enthusiam of large masses in a filled auditorium. `He promised equal rights for all citizens, but his adherents, regardless of their capabilities, enjoyed privileges before all other citizens. He promised to put the Jews under the same protection which foreigners enjoyed, yet he deprived them of every legal protection. He had promised to fight against political lies, but together with his minister Goebbels he cultivated nothing by political lies and political fraud. He promised the German people to maintain the principles of positive Christianity, yet he tolerated and sponsored measures by which institutions of the church were abused, reviled, and damaged. Also, in the foreign political field he always spoke against a war on two fronts -- and then later undertook it himself. He despised and disregarded all laws of the Weimar Republic, to which he had taken the oath when he became chancellor. He mobilized the Gestapo against personal liberty. He pardoned criminals and enlisted them in his service. He did everything to break his promises. He lied to and decieved the world, Germany, and me.' Spotlighting the fallacy in the argument of many of his fellow defendants that they were bound by the oath of allegiance that they had taken to Hitler, Schacht pointed out that Hitler himself had taken the oath to the Weimar constitution and that this constitution had never been repealed, but that Hitler had violated it repeatedly. Ministers, Schacht said, could not evade their responsibilities by referring to the 'Fuehrer Principle.' The responsibility of the ministers continued to exist, my own also, and was kept down only by the terror and the violent threats of Hitler. I would never keep an oath of allegiance to a perjurer, and Hitler turned out to be a perjurer a hundredfold.'" (Conot, 396-7) Work Cited Conot, Robert E. Justice at Nuremberg. New York: Harper & Row, 1983
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