In that way, Witness, the circle of which you were then a member came under National Socialist influences. Was this also supported with reading, reading of National Socialist literature?
VON SCHIRACH: Of course, I do not know what my comrades read, with the exception of one book which I shall give you directly. I know only what I read myself; I was interested at that time in the writings of the Bayreuth thinker, Chamberlain, in The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, in the writings of Adolf Bartels, in his Introduction to World Literature and History of German National Literature. There were works...
THE PRESIDENT: I have already told you that we do not want to know the full story of the defendant’s education. He is now giving us a series of the books which he has read, but we are not interested.
DR. SAUTER: Very well, Mr. President.
VON SCHIRACH: I shall only say in one sentence that these were works which had no definite anti-Semitic tendencies, but through which anti-Semitism was drawn like a red thread. The decisive anti-Semitic book which I read at that time and the book which influenced my comrades...
DR. SAUTER: Please...
VON SCHIRACH: ...was Henry Ford’s book, The International Jew; I read it and became anti-Semitic. In those days this book made such a deep impression on my friends and myself because we saw in Henry Ford the representative of success, also the exponent of a progressive social policy. In the poverty-stricken and wretched Germany of the time, youth looked toward America, and apart from the great benefactor, Herbert Hoover, it was Henry Ford who to us represented America.
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Sauter, the Tribunal thinks, as I have said twice now, that the educational influences of the defendant are quite irrelevant to us. I do not want to say it again and, unless you can control the defendant and keep him to the point, I shall have to stop his evidence.
DR. SAUTER: But, Mr. President, is it not of interest to the Tribunal when judging this defendant and his personality that they know how the defendant became a National Socialist and how the defendant became anti-Semitic? I had thought...
THE PRESIDENT: No, it is not of interest to the Tribunal.