MAJOR JONES: Finally, I want to ask you one or two questions about the Defendant Schacht.
When did you first hear of Schacht’s relations with the Nazi leaders?
SEVERING: In 1931 I received information from the police administration in Berlin, that interviews had been taking place between Mr. Schacht and the leaders of the National Socialist German Workers Party.
MAJOR JONES: Did you have any connections with Schacht in 1944?
SEVERING: If the matter is of any interest here to anybody, I actually refused these connections. Schacht—although I held him in high esteem as an economic expert—was known to me as a rather unreliable person in political matters. By joining the Harzburg Front, Schacht betrayed the cause of democracy. This was not only an act of ingratitude, for it was only through the Democrats that he ever reached the post of President of the Reichsbank, but it was also a great mistake since he and others of the same social standing by joining the Harzburg Front first made the National Socialists—so to speak—socially acceptable.
I could not, for this very reason, agree to any co-operation with Schacht on 20 July 1944, and when in March 1943 I was asked to join a government which was to overthrow Hitler, I categorically refused to do so, giving Schacht’s machinations and sundry other circumstances as my excuse.
MAJOR JONES: What was your reason for that?
SEVERING: I have just indicated these reasons. My friend Leuschner, who was hanged, together with other young Social Democrats—Von Harnack, Weber, Maas—my friend Leuschner and I discussed the composition of such a government. Leuschner informed me that a general would probably be the President of the Reich, and another general would be the Minister for War. I pointed out that Schacht in all probability would become financial or economic dictator, since Schacht was suitable for such a post through his actual or alleged connections with American business circles. But these connections between Schacht and—in National Socialist parlance—between plutocracy and militarism, this connection, I say, appeared to me so compromising to the cause of democracy, especially to the cause of Social Democracy, that I was under no circumstances prepared to become a member of any cabinet in which Schacht would be the financial dictator.
MAJOR JONES: Thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: Do you want to re-examine?