DR. SAUTER: The revolution of 1918-1919?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes, the revolution of 1918-1919. My father had been thrown out of his position by the Reds. The National Assembly in Weimar had convened. The Weimar Republic had been founded. We had a parliamentary system, we had a democracy, or what we in Germany thought was a democracy—I doubt that it was one. It was about 1923. I was at home at the time. It was a period of general insecurity, want, and dissatisfaction; many respectable families had become beggars through the inflation, and the worker and the citizen had lost their savings. The name “Hitler” made its appearance in connection with the events of 9 November 1923. I was not able at the time to gain any exact information about him. This Trial has informed me and people of my generation for the first time what Hitler actually wanted. At that time I was not a National Socialist. Together with some boys of my age I joined a youth organization which had the name “Knappenschaft.” It was in some way connected with the people’s movement, but it was not bound to any party. The principles of that organization were simply comradeship, patriotism, and self-control. There were about 100 boys from my city in it at the time who, in this youth organization, fought against the shallow tendencies of youth in the postwar period and against the dissipation indulged in by growing youngsters.
In that circle, as a 16-year-old, I first came in contact with socialism, for here I found youths from every level, working boys, craftsmen, young office employees, sons of farmers. But there were some older ones among us too, who were already settled in life, and some also who had been in the World War. From discussions with these comrades I came to grasp for the first time the consequences of the Versailles Treaty in their full import. The situation of the youth at the time was this: The school boy had the prospect of struggling through somehow or other as a working student, and then he would in all probability become a member of the academic proletariat for the possibility of an academic career practically did not exist for him at all. The young worker had no prospect of finding an apprenticeship. For him there was nothing other than the grim misery of unemployment. It was a generation nobody would help unless it helped itself.
DR. SAUTER: And that circle to which you belonged as a 16-year-old boy, then, gradually drifted into the currents of National Socialism?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes, and in quite a natural way.
DR. SAUTER: How did it happen?
VON SCHIRACH: In central Germany there were disturbances. I need only mention the name of the Communist bandit leader, Max Hölz, to indicate what conditions obtained at the time. And even after outward calm had come, conditions still prevailed that made it impossible to hold patriotic meetings because they were usually broken up by Communists. There came an appeal to us young people to furnish protection for these patriotic meetings, and we did. Some of us were wounded in doing this. One of us, a certain Garschar, was killed by Communists. In that manner a large number of national meetings took place which otherwise could not have been held in the Weimar Republic, National Socialist meetings, too; and to an increasing degree it was exactly such meetings that we had to protect because the Communist terror was directed against them particularly.
Through this protective activity I met leading National Socialists—at first as speakers, naturally, not personally. I heard Count Reventlow speak; I think I heard Rosenberg then too; I heard Streicher speak and heard the first oratorical efforts of Sauckel, who soon after became Gauleiter of the National Socialist Party in Thuringia. In this way...
THE PRESIDENT: What date is he speaking of?
DR. SAUTER: This is the period around 1924, that is, a year after the Hitler Putsch.