Chapter XXIV: Book 2: Page 144, Document Number Raeder-77 (2)

As Schulte-Mönting has affirmed, Raeder was just as surprised by the sudden attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor as every other German. The attempt of the Prosecution to discredit this statement during the cross-examination of Schulte-Mönting by introducing a telegram from the naval attaché in Tokyo to Berlin, dated 6 December 1941 (Document D-872), failed. In the first place Raeder probably only received this telegram after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December had already started; and besides, Pearl Harbor is not mentioned at all in the telegram.

The charge of the Prosecution with regard to Brazil has been refuted just as effectively because, after my statements during the hearing of evidence, the Prosecution did not revert to this point in any of the cross-examinations of Raeder, Schulte-Mönting, and Wagner. The charge was that, according to Jodl’s diary, the Naval Operations Staff authorized and approved the use of arms against Brazilian warships and merchant vessels fully 2 months before the outbreak of war between Germany and Brazil (Document 1807-PS).

Apart from the testimony of witnesses, this case is refuted by documents, namely, the complete excerpt from Jodl’s diary which I submitted as Exhibit Number Raeder-115, as well as by Documents Number Raeder-116 to 118. These documents reveal that Brazil had violated the rules of neutrality by permitting the United States to make use of Brazilian airfields as a base for attacks on German and Italian U-boats. The Brazilian Air Ministry had furthermore officially announced that attacks had been made by the Brazilian Air Force. Considering such conduct, which is against all the rules of neutrality, the demand of the Naval Operations Staff for armed action against Brazilian vessels is justified. So here again the Prosecution failed to prove Raeder to have committed a crime or even a violation of international law.

The Prosecution has very painstakingly submitted an exceedingly large amount of material, and the wealth of detail called for great care in the submission of evidence for the Defense. I have endeavored to deal with all the charges in the submission of evidence or in my final plea, and have made efforts to show as clearly as possible that none of them, partly on factual, partly on legal grounds, comply with the requirements of a criminal case within the meaning of this Charter. Insofar as I have not, in spite of my desire for great exactitude, dealt with certain documents, it was because they seemed to me of small importance and in any case of no importance in criminal law; for instance, the many cases in which Raeder was only mentioned because—without officially taking any part—he received a copy of the documents for routine reasons. It would have been tedious to go into such recurrent cases, even if the Prosecution reiterated these formal indications, so that one was often tempted to recall the saying of Napoleon that repetition is that turn of speech which acts as the best evidence.

I further believe that in my final plea for Admiral Raeder I may forego argumentation regarding genuine war crimes, the crimes against humanity, since I am unable to establish any connection between these and Raeder from the material submitted by the Prosecution. Also no particular charge is made against Raeder in this connection, with the exception of the two cases connected with the Commando Order, namely, the shooting of two soldiers in Bordeaux and the shooting of the British soldier Evans, who was made a prisoner by the SD on the Swedish border after he had previously participated in the midget submarine attack on the _Tirpitz_. Thus far the charge has been refuted by testimony insofar as it concerns the Navy. Both cases did not come, or came only later, to the knowledge of the Naval Operations Staff—just before Raeder’s departure. In both cases action was taken on the basis of the Commando Order by Hitler himself or by the SD without the knowledge and will of the Naval Operations Staff; and what is most important, in both cases the documents of the Prosecution showed that these soldiers were in civilian clothes and, therefore, were not entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention (Document Number D-864, Exhibit GB-457 and Document UK-57, Exhibit GB-164).

All the other criminal facts which the Prosecution submitted, especially applying to the East, I need not deal with, as Raeder did not participate in them. I hope that here also I shall have the approval of the Court in mentioning the handling of the Katyn case, in which the Court pointed out that Raeder was not involved and therefore refused to allow me to act as defense counsel in this connection; from this I draw the legal conclusion that Raeder cannot even by implication through the conspiracy be considered as burdened with these criminal facts, since he did not know of these events and had nothing to do with them.

The case for the Prosecution is founded on a desire to see its basic theory accepted and acknowledged, namely, the conception that so many crimes cannot have emanated from the will of a single individual but rather that they result from a conspiracy, a plot, involving many persons. These conspirators could logically, in the first place, only have been Hitler’s own collaborators, that is to say, the real National Socialists. Since however, Hitler wished to achieve and did achieve concrete results of military and economic import, something peculiar transpired: There were no specialists among the National Socialists for these tasks. Most of the National Socialist collaborators had not previously followed a trade providing technical education. Hitler, therefore, despite his desire to have only National Socialists around him, took on as key people in particular fields specialists who were not National Socialists, such as for instance Neurath for politics, and Schacht for economics; and for military tasks, Fritsch for the Army and Raeder for the Navy. The Prosecution followed this process from the angle of its conspiracy theory, without paying attention to the fact that these people, not being National Socialists, could in no way be counted among the conspirators and without taking into account that Hitler used these non-National Socialists only as technicians in a well-defined field, and only as long as it seemed absolutely necessary to him; therefore he agreed to the departure of these men, who were essentially not in sympathy with him, as soon as the differences between them seemed unbridgeable, which was bound to happen sooner or later with each of them, depending on the particular field involved.

By this all-embracing conception of the idea of conspiracy and by this extension of the Prosecution’s fight to non-National Socialists, the Prosecution abandoned the basic concept formerly propagated abroad, namely, that of fighting National Socialism but not against the whole of Germany—two ideas which at no time and in no place have been really identical, as the Prosecution now tries to make out. I do believe that thereby the Prosecution is also going back on President Roosevelt’s basic idea.

Yet another factual and legal point of view has not been taken into consideration by the Prosecution. I mean the concept of the division of competence under state law, that is to say the subdivision into individual departments. This division of competence, founded on the idea of division of labor, is essentially separative in character; it divides the field of work according to local, functional, and technical points of view. Thereby it defines positively the limits within which each division is to become active, and at the same time it defines negatively the boundaries of such activity by specifying which problems no longer concern the agencies in question, that is to say, where they must not exercise any official activity.

In a democracy additional contacts exist by virtue of general Cabinet meetings and through the Prime Minister, the Reich President, or the Reich Chancellor, as the case may be. In a dictatorship it is different, particularly if the dictator, as was the case with Hitler in the National Socialist State, exploits the segregation of the various departments with extreme skill and sees to it that they are kept as isolated as possible, with the result that all power of decision rests finally with him as the dictator, who may even play off one department against the other. The strict partitioning into governmental departments as carried out in the National Socialist State in itself refutes the concept of conspiracy and renders it extremely difficult for the individual to exceed the limits of his own department in any manner.

This significance may be illustrated by the following example: The maintenance of political relations with other states, the contracting or cancellation of agreements or alliances with other states, the declaration of war and conclusion of peace, are matters within the jurisdiction of the authority directing foreign affairs; but they are not within the jurisdiction of the agencies concerned with domestic tasks, such as for instance the Reich Finance Administration, Justice, or the Military.

Thus, since the decision concerning war and peace is not a matter for the military, the military has to accept the decisions made by the political leadership, decisions which have a binding material effect on the military authorities. The military commander must assume for his department the consequences resulting from the decision. As soon as war is declared, the military forces must fight. They do not bear any responsibility for the war, since they were not able to take part in the decision that war should be declared. Consequently, for an army the concept of war of aggression exists in the strategic sense only. Aside from that, any war it may be obliged to wage is, to the army, simply war, regardless of how it may be qualified legally (Article 45 of the Reich Constitution).

Responsibility, from the point of view of state law and criminal law, is in proportion to the extent of jurisdiction. Therefore, if the commander-in-chief of a branch of the Armed Forces is responsible solely for the waging of war, though not for the causes leading to war, his responsibility in respect to a strategic plan must be confined to the plan as such, but not to the possible origin of the war for which the strategic plan was worked out.

This officially and legally important segregation of governmental departments and the distribution of authority was, in the interest of strengthening his own power in a particularly emphatic manner, carried out by Hitler in many domains, such as for instance the creation of the “Delegate for the Four Year Plan,” whose field of work should have belonged to the Ministry of Economics; the creation of Reich Commissioners in the occupied territories, whose activity really should have come under military administration; and, finally, a fact of interest in the Raeder case, the very precise delimitation of the three branches of the Armed Forces and the elimination of the Reich Defense Minister or Minister of War who held the three branches of the Armed Forces together and unified them. The greater the number of governmental departments became, the stronger Hitler became as dictator, being the only person with authority over all the innumerable agencies. But along with this the official as well as the legal responsibility for strategic plans on the part of any one individual department decreased; in this instance, that of the Navy.

Consequently, the commander-in-chief of a branch of the Armed Forces, for instance the Navy, can in case of strategic planning only be responsible for the planning of naval strategy; he is not afforded an over-all picture of the total plan. The total plan was discussed nowhere; politically and militarily it was in Hitler’s hands exclusively, because he alone was the center where all threads, all activities of the individual departments joined.

May I add a sentence here and remind you that, for instance, in the case of the Norway action even Göring was not informed until March 1940, which is one proof of the extreme segregation of the individual departments within the Armed Forces. In addition, purely strategic planning as such cannot be criminal, because it is customary in every country and because in every country the military commander of a branch of the Armed Forces does not and cannot know to what end the political leadership will use the plan prepared by him, whether for a war of aggression or a defensive war.

The documents submitted in my document books prove convincingly that the military agencies in Allied countries as well as in Germany worked out strategic plans in the same manner, for the same areas, and at the same times, namely, in regard to Norway, Belgium (Documents Number Raeder-33 and 34), Holland, Greece, Romania; moreover, the Allied plans included the destruction of the Romanian oil fields and especially of the oil sources in the Caucasus (Document Number Ribbentrop-221 and Number Raeder-41). Particularly the plans concerning the Caucasus on the part of the Supreme Council, that is, the combined British and French General Staff, show the correctness of the statements. The Supreme Council would certainly refuse to be made politically responsible for these strategic plans, although the Soviet Union was still neutral at the time and the execution of the plans was to strike a blow not only at an enemy country, Germany, but also at a neutral, the Soviet Union, as the documents show.

The similarity of the documents concerning such plans is absolutely convincing and shows a strong parallel trend. May I point in this connection to statements I made here on occasion of the comprehensive discussion regarding the relevance and admissibility of the documents submitted by me; may I point, in addition, to Document Number Raeder-130, the letter of the Foreign Office, in which submission of the British Admiralty files is refused but in which the plans in regard to Norway and the whole of Scandinavia are admitted, with the remark that the plan was not put into effect, which fact was due only to Germany’s having forestalled the execution of the plan.

Anyone is entitled to be a pacifist and, therefore, basically opposed to the military. However, one must be consistent and take a stand not only against German military force but against any military force. One may condemn the fact that the military, as the operational authority, prepares military plans; and one may for the future insist that such planning shall be punishable. But in that case not only German military planning, but foreign military planning also must be punishable.

These points show that the Prosecution misjudges both actual and legal conditions in desiring to make Raeder responsible for political decisions, although he had nothing to do with them but always worked simply as a soldier. Just as there could be no suggestion 130 years ago of bringing before a court an admiral of Napoleon, the dictator, it is impossible now to condemn an admiral of Hitler, the dictator. With dictators, in particular—and this the Prosecution overlooks—not only the power and the influence of a military commander diminishes, but his responsibility must also diminish to the same extent, for the dictator will have seized all power and with it all responsibility—especially if he is possessed of such an extraordinary will and such immense power as Hitler. The French prosecutor stated literally and very aptly on 7 February 1946 before this Tribunal: “Hitler was actually the incarnation of all will.”

The resulting strength and power has not been sufficiently appreciated by the Prosecution, and has certainly not been taken into consideration in the presentation of the facts and the legal conclusions. How great this power is, Gustave le Bon shows in his famous book _Psychology of the Masses_ (published by Alfred Kröner) in the chapter entitled, “The Leaders of the Masses.” I quote from it:

“Within the class of leaders quite a strict division can be
made. The energetic people with strong wills but without
perseverance belong to the one kind; the people with a strong,
persevering will belong to the other kind, which is much
rarer.... The second class, those with a persevering will,
exercise a much greater influence in spite of their less
brilliant appearance.”

Hitler belongs to this second class of leaders, who, in accordance with this quotation, exercised an immense influence while, on the other hand, he was definitely unimpressive in his brown uniform.

Gustave le Bon continues:

“The unyielding will which they possess is an exceedingly rare
and exceedingly powerful attribute which subdues everything. One
does not always realize what a strong and persistent will can
achieve. Nothing can resist it, neither nature, nor gods, nor
men.”

These words make it clear enough that Raeder could not resist either.

Accordingly, only the question remains: Is it ever a soldier’s duty to revolt—to resort to open mutiny? This question will be denied by every commander all over the world and likewise by every other person with a sole exception, namely, if it concerns the case of a dictator commanding the commission of a crime, the criminality of which is recognized by the military commander himself. Accordingly Raeder could be made responsible for a military crime only, but not for a political one, because for the political crime the dictator himself must answer. When the Prosecution came to the opposite conclusion regarding Raeder, this was due—as I have already emphasized in my introduction—only to their misconception of the actual and juridical facts; they regarded Raeder as politician and soldier. But he was a soldier only. He lived for the Navy alone, for the welfare of the Navy, for which he is now equally prepared to bear responsibility to the full extent. He led the Navy along uniform lines and, aided by his officer-corps, taught it those decent views and that form of chivalrous fighting which humanity expects of a soldier. It must not be allowed to happen that, as a result of the deeds of a Hitler and his National Socialism, the officers and soldiers of this Navy be defamed by hearing their highest-ranking officer declared a criminal. From a historical viewpoint Raeder may be guilty, because he, like many others within the country and abroad, did not recognize or see through Hitler and did not have the strength to resist the dynamic strength of a Hitler; but such an omission is no crime. What Raeder did or left undone in his life occurred in the belief that he was acting correctly and that as a dutiful soldier he had to act in such a way.

Raeder is a highly esteemed officer who is no criminal; and he cannot be a criminal, since all his life he has lived honorably and as a Christian. A man who believes in God does not commit crimes, and a soldier who believes in God is not a war criminal.

I therefore ask the High Tribunal to acquit Admiral Dr. Erich Raeder on all points of the Indictment.

PRESIDENT: I call on Dr. Sauter for the Defendant Von Schirach.

DR. SAUTER: Gentlemen of the Tribunal, Baldur von Schirach, who at that time was Reich Youth Leader, in 1936 welcomed the guests to the Olympic Games in Berlin with the following words:

“Youth throws a bridge across all frontiers and seas! I call
upon the Youth of the World and through them, upon Peace!”

And Baldur von Schirach, then Gauleiter of Vienna, said to Hitler in 1940: “Vienna cannot be conquered with bayonets, but only with music.”

Those two utterances are characteristic of the nature of this defendant. It is the task of the Defense to examine the evidence produced in this Trial for the purpose of ascertaining whether the same Baldur von Schirach, who expressed such thoughts, really committed those crimes against law and humanity with which he is charged by the Prosecution.

Schirach is the youngest defendant here. He is also, of all the defendants, the one who was by far the youngest when joining the Party, which he did when he was not yet 18. Those facts in themselves are perhaps of some significance in judging his case. When still at school he came under the spell of rising National Socialism; he was particularly attracted by the Socialist idea, which had already in his country school recognized no difference between the sons of fathers of different classes and professions; those boys around Schirach saw in the popular movement of the twenties in Germany a promise of the resurgence of our fatherland from the aftermath of the lost Great War into a happy future; and fate willed it that as early as 1925, when he was seventeen, Schirach came into personal contact with Hitler in Weimar, Goethe’s home. Hitler’s personality made a fascinating impression on young Schirach, as he himself admitted; the program for the National Community (Volksgemeinschaft), which Hitler had evolved at that time, met with Schirach’s wholehearted enthusiasm, because he thought he saw reproduced therein on a full-size scale that which he had personally experienced in a small way in the comradeship of the country school and in his youth organization. To him and his comrades Hitler appeared as the man who would open for the younger generation the road into the future; of him this younger generation had hopes for its prospects of work, its prospects of a secure existence, its prospects of a happy life. Thus the young man became a convinced National Socialist; this fact was the result of the environment in which he had spent his youth and which formed a soil only too fertile for the growth of that ideology which young Schirach embraced because at that period he held it to be the right one. This environment of his childhood and a vast amount of one-sided political literature, which the young man devoured in his thirst for knowledge, made of him, while still an inexperienced youth, also an anti-Semite. He certainly did not become an anti-Semite in the sense of those fanatics who ultimately did not shrink even from acts of violence and pogroms, of those who finally created an Auschwitz and murdered millions of Jews; but an anti-Semite in the moderate sense, who would merely curb Jewish influence in the government of the state and in cultural life but for the rest would leave untouched the freedom and rights of Jewish fellow citizens and who never thought of exterminating the Jewish people. At least that is the conception of Hitler’s anti-Semitism which young Schirach evolved during those years.

That this was really Schirach’s opinion is also substantiated by the statement which Schirach made here on the morning of 24 May 1946, when he described without reservation the crimes committed by Hitler as a shameful episode in German history, as a crime which fills every German with shame; that statement in which he openly states that Auschwitz must signify the end of any and every racial and anti-Semitic policy. That statement here in this courtroom came from the bottom of the heart of the Defendant Schirach; it was the result of the terrible disclosures which this Trial brought to him also, and Schirach made this statement here openly before the public in order to bring back German youth from a wrong path to the road of justice and tolerance.

Gentlemen, I would now like to bring to your attention the more important accusations which have been raised against Schirach, and the major results which the evidence has produced in the various points. The Defendant Schirach is first of all accused of the fact that before the seizure of power, that is, before the year 1933, he actively promoted the National Socialist Party and the youth organization affiliated with it and that he thereby contributed to the rise of the Party to power. He had been, as stated in the trial brief, a close and abject follower of Hitler; he had stood in blind loyalty to Hitler and the latter’s National Socialist world of thinking; and he had, as leader of the student’s league, led the students ideologically and politically to National Socialism and won them over to it.

All this, if Your Honors please, is not denied by Schirach in any manner. He has done what he is being accused of in this respect; this he confesses openly, and for this he naturally takes responsibility. The only thing which he denies with regard to this, and all the more emphatically with regard to the later period, is the accusation that he participated in a conspiracy. Schirach himself pointed out that the Leadership Principle and dictatorship in their character and their theory are absolutely incompatible with the idea of a conspiracy, and a conspiracy appears to him a logical impossibility if many millions of members are to be included and when its existence and aims lie exposed before the country concerned as well as before the world. 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.)