Gentlemen, the receipt for 300 marks was produced here in this court. With 300 marks they tried to deprive me of my honor.
I mention this case only because my case is a special case; and if it is to be judged with justice, then I must be allowed to make such a remark in passing. In this connection, I may say that it is no coincidence that the first question asked me by the Soviet Russian officer who interrogated me was whether I was a sex criminal.
Gentlemen, I told you how I was fated to be drawn into the Schutz und Trutzbund. I told you what conditions were like in Germany at the time, and it was therefore quite a natural development that I no longer visited the centers of revolution to join in debate. I felt myself impelled to call meetings of my own and so I spoke for perhaps 15 years almost every Friday before about 5,000 to 6,000 people. I admit quite frankly that I went on making speeches over a period of 20 years in the largest cities of Germany, sometimes at meetings on sport fields and on public squares, to audiences of 150,000 to 200,000 people. I did that for 20 years, and I state here that I was not paid by the Party. The Prosecution will never succeed, not even through a public appeal, in getting anybody into this room who could testify that I had ever been paid. I still had a small salary which continued after I was relieved of my position in 1924. Nonetheless, I remained the one and only unpaid Gauleiter in the Movement. It goes without saying that my writing supported myself and my assistants later on.
And so, Gentlemen, in the year 1921—I return now to that period—I went to Munich. I was curious because someone had said to me, “You must hear Adolf Hitler some time.” And now destiny again takes a hand. This tragedy can only be grasped by those whose vision is not limited to the material, but who can perceive those higher vibrations which even today have not had their full outcome.
I went to the Munich Bürgerbräukeller. Adolf Hitler was speaking there. I had only heard his name. I had never seen the man before. And there I sat, an unknown among unknowns. I saw this man shortly before midnight, after he had spoken for 3 hours, drenched in perspiration, radiant. My neighbor said he thought he saw a halo around his head; and I, Gentlemen, experienced something which transcended the commonplace. When he finished his speech, an inner voice bade me get up. I went to the platform. When Adolf Hitler came down, I approached him and told him my name.
The Prosecution has submitted a document to the Tribunal which recalls that moment. Adolf Hitler wrote in his book, Mein Kampf, that it must have cost me a great effort to hand over to him the movement which I had created in Nuremberg.
I mention this because the Prosecution thought that these things in Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, should be submitted and used against me. Yes, I am proud of it; I forced myself to hand over to Hitler the movement which I had created in Franconia. This Franconian movement gave the movement which Adolf Hitler had created in Munich and southern Bavaria a bridge to northern Germany. That was my doing.
In 1923 I took part in the first National Socialist revolution or, rather, attempted revolution. It will go down in history as the Hitler Putsch. Adolf Hitler had asked me to come to Munich for it. I went to Munich and took part in the meeting in which Adolf Hitler came to a solemn agreement with representatives of the middle classes to go to northern Germany and put an end to the chaos.
I marched with them up to the Feldherrnhalle. Then I was arrested and, like Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, and others, was taken to Landsberg on the Lech. After a few months I was put up as candidate for the Bavarian Parliament by the Völkischer Block and was elected in the year 1924.
In 1925 after the Movement had been permitted again and Adolf Hitler had been released from jail, I was made Gauleiter of Franconia. In 1933 I became a deputy to the Reichstag. In 1933 or 1934 the honorary title of SA Gruppenführer was bestowed on me.