SCHACHT: Yes.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: I ask you if this is what you, as head of the Reichsbank, required of the employees whom you were taking over in Austria; and I quote:
“Now I shall ask you to rise. (The audience rises.) Today we pledge allegiance to the great Reichsbank family, to the great German community; we pledge allegiance to our newly arisen, powerful Greater German Reich, and we sum up all these sentiments in the allegiance to the man who has brought about all this transformation. I ask you to raise your hands and to repeat after me:
“I swear that I will be faithful and obedient to the Führer of the German Reich and the German people, Adolf Hitler, and will perform my duties conscientiously and selflessly. (The audience takes the pledge with uplifted hands.)
“You have taken this pledge. A bad fellow he who breaks it. To our Führer a triple ‘Sieg Heil’.”
Is that a correct representation of what took place?
SCHACHT: The oath is the prescribed civil service oath and it is quite in accordance with what I said here yesterday, that the oath is made to the head of the state just as I have stated before too: “We stand united before the German people”—I do not know exactly what the German expression is. I hear your English version here. That oath is exactly the same.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: I have referred to Document EC-297, Exhibit USA-632, in the course of this. That is the exhibit I have been using.
So you say that was to an impersonal head of state and not to Adolf Hitler?
SCHACHT: Yes. One obviously cannot take an oath to an idea. Therefore, one has to use a person. But I said yesterday that I did not take an oath to Herr Ebert or to Herr Hindenburg or to the Kaiser, but to the head of State as representative of the people.