DR. HORN: What was your last position in the Foreign Office?
VON STEENGRACHT: From May 1943 I was State Secretary of the Foreign Office.
DR. HORN: What were your activities?
VON STEENGRACHT: In order to present my activities in a comprehensible way, I must make the following prefatory remarks:
From the beginning of the war, the Foreign Minister had his office in the neighborhood of Hitler’s headquarters; that is to say in most instances several hundred kilometers distant from Berlin. There he carried on business with a restricted staff. The Foreign Office in Berlin had duties of a routine and administrative nature. But above all, its duty was also the execution of the regular intercourse with foreign diplomats.
Within the limits of this field of duties, I bore the responsibility, as State Secretary, from May 1943. The molding of foreign political opinion, the decisions and instructions in foreign policy, on the other hand, originated from headquarters, mostly without any participation, sometimes also without any subsequent information to the Foreign Office.
DR. HORN: Who determined the basic lines of the foreign policy?
VON STEENGRACHT: The foreign policy, not only on its basic lines, but also usually down to the most minute details, was determined by Hitler himself. Ribbentrop frequently stated that the Führer needed no Foreign Minister, he simply wanted a foreign political secretary. Ribbentrop, in my opinion, would have been satisfied with such a position because then at least, backed by Hitler’s authority, he could have eliminated partly the destructive and indirect foreign political influences and their sway on Hitler. Perhaps he might then have had a chance of influencing Hitler’s speeches, which the latter was accustomed to formulate without Ribbentrop, even in the foreign political field.
DR. HORN: Were there other offices or personalities, in addition to the Foreign Office, that concerned themselves with foreign policy?
VON STEENGRACHT: Yes, there was practically no office in the Party or its organizations that, after 1933, had no foreign political ambitions. Every one of these offices had a sort of foreign bureau through which it took up connections with foreign countries in the attempt to gain its own foreign political channels.