One Hundred and Thirty-Ninth Day:
Monday, 27th May, 1946
[Page 14]
A. I did not recollect it on that occasion two years later,
and in my speech I did not mean it either.
Q. You forgot that Hitler said he must exterminate the
intelligentsia, that you must be masters of these people,
that they must remain at a low standard of living? Did that
pass out of your mind so easily?
A. I remember that speech at Kattowitz; I spoke there about
completely different matters. I assume that the prosecution
even has the shorthand record of that speech and need only
submit it here. This is just a short extract.
Q. But, you see, witness, the point is, knowing what the
policy was, I would like to have you tell the Tribunal how
you could urge and praise that policy to a group of young
people and party leaders of the occasion of this speech in
Kattowitz.
A. The policy which I was recommending to youth leaders
there was not the policy which Hitler developed in his
table-talk.
Q. Of course, you said it was the Fuehrer's policy in your
speech, and you know it was, but I will not press it further
if that is your answer.
A. Very often probably - and I once said this here - I
supported the policy of the Fuehrer out of erroneous loyalty
to him. I know that it was not right.
Q. That is what I want to know. You were, were you not,
acting under an impulse of loyalty to the Fuehrer? Now you
recognize it to be erroneous, and that is all I am inquiring
for, and if you tell the Tribunal that, I shall be perfectly
satisfied.
A. Yes, I am prepared to admit that.
Q. Very well. And, witness, now we are getting to it; that
goes for all these things that went on.
A. Not at all.
Q. Have you not to say to the Tribunal concerning your
letter to Der Sturmer and all of these things about the
Jewish people to the young people, and this slow building up
of race hatred in them, the co-operation with the SS, your
handling of the Jews in Vienna, that for all these things
you are, and for all of them, responsible?
A. No.
MR. DODD: Finally, I want to offer in evidence, Mr.
President, some excerpts from these weekly SS reports to
which I referred briefly on Friday, so that they shall be
before the Tribunal. There are 55 of them, Mr. President,
and they run consecutively by weeks, and they all bear the
stamp of this defendant's office as having been received
there, and they supplant the monthly report which was
received up to the time that weekly reports began arriving.
We have not had all of them translated or mimeographed, and
if the defendant wishes to put in any others, we will make
them available, of course. We have selected a few as samples
to illustrate the kind of report that was contained in these
weekly reports, and I wish to offer them.
The first one is No. 1, beginning on 1st May, 1942, and No.
4, No. 6, No. 7, No. 9, No. 38, No. 41, and No. 49.
Now I want to make this clear to you, witness, out of
fairness. Besides statements concerning what was happening
to the Jews, you will find in these weekly reports a number
of statements about the partisan affairs in the East as
well. These excerpts have mostly to do with what happened to
the Jews, and we have not, Mr. President, drawn out a great
number that had to do with the partisans. There are a
number, however, that do have to do with partisans and
[Page 15]
Q. I just want to ask you, with respect to these weekly
reports: Do you, this morning, recall that you did receive
them every week in your office?
A. But that is not my office. My office is the central
office. That office was directed by the Government
President, and one of his officials initialled the files, as
appears from the markings on them, and as any official
trained in German bureaucracy can confirm. They were then
put before the Government President who marked them "for the
files" and initialled them. I could not know these documents
at all.
Q. Now just a minute. You were the Reich Commissioner for
the defence of that territory, were you not?
A. Yes.
Q. And that is the stamp that is on these weekly reports, is
it not?
A. Yes.
Q. Well, what do you mean by saying that it was not your
office?
A. Because the mail, by a procedure similar to that in a
ministry, where it goes to the office of the minister,
reached me in the central office; and a corresponding note
had to be made on these files. I can understand perfectly
well why the Government President, since I was overburdened
with work, did not submit to me material which had no
connection at all with Vienna or my activities, but which
was merely informative and concerned with events in Russia,
mostly guerrilla fighting in Russia.
Q. I am going to ask you, again, as I have so many times in
the course of this examination: Dellbruegge, who initialled
these, was your principal assistant, was he not? Yes or no.
A. Yes, he was one of my three deputies.
Q. And he was also an SS man, and so was your other
principal assistant, as we asked the other day.
A. Dellbruegge was a high SS leader. He was a special
confidant of the Reich Leader SS.
Q. How did he happen to be working for you?
A. He was assigned to me there.
MR. DODD: Mr. President, I do not think it is necessary to
read any excerpts from these weekly reports. They have been
translated into four languages, and - well, I am
misinformed. I thought they were translated. Then I think it
would be better if we do have them translated and submit
them at a later date rather than take the time to read them
now.
I have no further questions.
THE PRESIDENT: Do you want to re-examine? We had better
adjourn now.
(A recess was taken.)
BY GENERAL ALEXANDROV:
Q. Do you admit that the Hitler Jugend had the task of
inculcating German youth and children, starting from nine
years of age, with Fascist ideology?
Do you hear me?
A. Yes, I understand you to ask, whether I would admit
having inculcated Fascist ideas into tento fourteen-year-old
children of the Hitler Youth?
As I said in my testimony a few days ago, I saw my mission
and my duty in educating German youth to be citizens of the
National Socialist State -
THE PRESIDENT (interposing): That is not an answer to the
question. It is not necessary for you to tell us what you
said in your previous evidence. Will you just answer the
question: Do you admit that you inculcated, in the Hitler
Youth, Hitler's ideology? You can answer that "yes" or "no."
[Page 16]
BY GENERAL ALEXANDROV:
Q. I would like you to confirm the evidence which you gave
on the 16th of November, 1945, during your interrogation.
You defined your personal attitude to Hitler in the
following way; and I quote your evidence:
Q. You do not understand me correctly. Nothing is said here
about deity. Your evidence has been taken down, and I will
repeat it:
Do you confirm this statement?
Answer the question directly.
A. The translation is quite inexact. May. I ask you to put
the exact question again?
Q. I will quote your statement again:
Is that right?
A. I am accused now of having said: "I was an enthusiastic
adherent of Hitler, and I considered everything that he
wrote and stated to be the personification of truth." That
is how I understood it, and I must say I could never have
uttered such nonsense.
DR. SERVATIUS (Counsel for the defendant Sauckel): May I
give an explanation of this translation? I think the correct
German would have to be: "I considered what Hitler said to
be a manifestation of truth," and not "the personification
of truth"; then it would be intelligible. There is a mistake
in the interpretation.
BY GENERAL ALEXANDROV:
Q. Your defence counsel has perhaps helped you to answer my
question.
A. General, that was not my defence counsel, but the defence
counsel for the defendant Sauckel. If it is translated
"manifestation of truth," then, of course, the whole passage
makes sense, and also corresponds roughly to what I said to
you when I described the period of my youth.
Q. Very well.
In your book, entitled Die Hitler Jugend, it said - and I
quote page 17: "Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, is our bible." Do
you confirm this? Did you write that?
A. But I added something to that in my book, The Hitler
Youth, its faith and organization. I want to say, first of
all, that I did write this book. I wrote it -
Q. I would like to interrupt you. I do not need such
detailed explanations; and I would like you to answer the
question: Is that sentence contained in your book?
[Page 17]
That is how I worded it at the time, that is correct.
Q. I would like to put another more precise question to you.
Do you admit that the Hitler Jugend was a political
organization which, under the leadership of the NSDAP,
carried out the policy of this Party among German youth?
A. The Hitler Youth was a large educational community on a
political basis, but I cannot admit that it was led by the
Party; it was led by me. I was a member of the Executive
Committee of the Party, and in that sense one might speak of
a Party influence. But I can see no reason for having to
confirm this, since I have already testified to it. It is
correct that the Hitler Youth was the youth organization of
the Party.
If that is the sense of your question, I will confirm it.
Q. Yes, I just had that in view.
I would like to remind you of the tasks which Hitler had
prescribed for the education of German youth. That is set
out in Rauschning's book, which has already been submitted
as documentary evidence before the Tribunal as Exhibit USSR
378. I quote page 252 of that book:
A. I will not admit what Herr Rauschning wrote. Just by
accident I was present at a conversation between Hitler and
Rauschning and, judging by it, I must say that the
statements in Rauschning's book represent an unfaithful
record of what Hitler said. Just by accident I witnessed a
conversation between them.
Hitler did not give me the directives which Rauschning sets
forth here as the guiding principles laid down by Hitler
himself for the training of the Hitler Youth.
Q. I did not ask you to give such a detailed explanation. I
would like you to answer the question I put to you briefly
in order to shorten the time of interrogation. You have
stated the Hitler Youth did not educate German youth in the
militaristic spirit and did not prepare German youth for
future aggressive wars. I would like to remind you of
certain statements you made in that very same book of yours,
Hitler Youth, right here on page 83 of that book. Talking of
the younger generation, the so-called Jungvolk, you wrote:
A. What is in front of me now is contained in my book. What
I heard from the interpreter is not in my book.
Q. Well, then, make your corrections.
A. May I read the correct passage:
[Page 18]
Who wears a school cap nowadays? And who nowadays is a
high-school boy or girl? In some towns the boys have
banded together and publicly burned such school caps.
Burning is, in fact, a speciality of new youth. The
border fences of the minor States of the Reich have also
been reduced to ashes in the fires of your youth.
It is a simple but heroic philosophy; everything that is
against our unity must be thrown into the flames."
Q. According to your opinion, the philosophy implies that
children must no longer play with toys, but must do other
things. Did I understand you correctly? I do not see any
essential differences between my quotation and yours.
A. May I say that I think the military training of the youth
of Germany falls much behind that of the Soviet Union.
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(Part 4 of 11)
[MR. DODD continues his cross examination of Baldur von Schirach] "I was an enthusiastic adherent of Hitler. I considered
everything that he wrote and stated to be a manifestation
of truth." (NOTE: The interpreter translated this: . . .
"looked upon him as a deity.") Do you confirm this
statement?
A. I did not say that, and that is not a record which was
submitted to me. I never spoke of Hitler as a deity, never.
I remember exactly, General, that you interrogated me on
this point, and I was asked whether I had been an
enthusiastic follower. I confirmed that, and I spoke about
the time when I joined the Movement; but I never set up the
comparison with which I am now confronted in the
translation; I never said that I believed in Hitler as a
deity, never.
"I was an enthusiastic adherent of Hitler, and I
considered everything that he wrote and stated to be a
manifestation of truth."
(The interpreter mistranslated this.)
"I was an enthusiastic adherent of Hitler, and I
considered everything that he wrote and stated to be a
manifestation of truth."
(The interpreter again mistranslated.)
"In my order we will bring up youth who will make the
world shudder with fear, youth that is hard, exigent,
unafraid and cruel. That is my wish. Youth must have all
these qualities; they must be indifferent to sufferings;
they must have neither weakness, nor softness. I would
like to see in their eyes the, proud, self-sufficient
glitter of a beast of prey."
You educated German youth in accordance with these demands
of Hitler. Do you admit that?
"They carry the National Socialist characteristics. The
toy merchants are worried because these children no
longer need toys; they are interested in camp tents,
spears, compasses and maps. It is a particular trait of
our youth. Everything that is against our unity must be
thrown into the flames."
And these also were the directives which German soldiers,
trained in the Hitler Youth, followed when they set on fire
houses of the peaceful population in occupied territories,
is that not true? Is that contained in the book, the passage
I have just read?
"The toy merchants have complained to me that the boys"
(they mean the Jungvolk) "no longer want toys, but are
interested only in tents, spears, compasses and maps. I
cannot help the toy merchants, for I agree with the
boys that the era of the 'Redskins ' is finally gone.
What is 'Old Shatterhend,' what is a trapper in the
backwoods of America compared to our troop-leader? A
miserable, dusty remnant from the lumber-chest of our
fathers. Not only the toy merchants are complaining but
also the school cap manufacturers.
That, General, is the expression of the "storm and stress"
of youth which has found its social unity.