DR. SAUTER: Please, go on.
VON SCHIRACH: Lietz’ idea was to give youth an education in which they have in the school an image of the state. The school community was a miniature state and in this school community was developed a self-administration of youth. I only want to point out in passing that he, too, was applying ideas which long before him had been developed by Pestalozzi and the great Jean Jacques. All modern education, of course, goes back somehow to Rousseau, be it a question of Hermann Lietz or the Boy Scouts, the Pathfinder movement or the German Wandervogel movement. At any rate, that idea of self-administration of youth in a school community gave me my idea of the self-leadership of youth.
My thought was to attract the younger generation in school to ideas that Fröbel had originated 80 years before. Lietz wanted to win over youth from early school days onward.
I may perhaps mention very briefly that when in 1898 Lietz began his educational work, the British Major Baden-Powell was being surrounded by rebels in a South African town, and was training youngsters to scout in the woods and with this laid the groundwork for his own Boy Scout movement, and that in that same year, in 1898, Karl Fischer from Berlin-Steglitz founded the Wandervogel movement.
DR. SAUTER: Witness, I think that this chapter, which is merely the historic background, might perhaps, in accordance with the wish of the President, be terminated now. If I understand you rightly then, you mean that those principles which you applied later on as Reich Youth Leader had become familiar to you in your own youth and in the youth movement of the time. Is that right?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes; basically, yes. The basic principles of my later work originate there.
DR. SAUTER: There is one more point I want to know in this connection. Did this education at that time have any political or anti-Semitic tendencies and how did you happen to get into politics?
VON SCHIRACH: No, that educational work had no political and most certainly no anti-Semitic tendencies, because Lietz came from the circles around the Democrat Naumann, from the Damaschke circle.
DR. SAUTER: But how did you get into politics?
VON SCHIRACH: In the meantime the revolution had broken out. My father...