DR. SAUTER: Then, if I understand your answer correctly, you were always surprised by these foreign developments.
VON SCHIRACH: Yes.
DR. SAUTER: Does the same apply to the question of the Austrian Anschluss?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes. I heard of the Anschluss of Austria, which of course I hailed enthusiastically, through the radio, if I remember rightly, during a trip by car from my Academy at Brunswick to Berlin. I continued my journey to Berlin, boarded a train at once, and arrived the following morning in Vienna. There I greeted the young people: youth leaders, some of whom had been in prisons or in a concentration camp at Wöllersdorf for a long time, and also many women youth leaders, who had also experienced great hardships.
DR. SAUTER: And what about the march into Czechoslovakia?
VON SCHIRACH: Like every other German citizen, I heard of that through the radio, and did not learn any more than any other citizen learned from the radio.
DR. SAUTER: Were you, in any capacity, a participant in the negotiations regarding the Munich Pact with Chamberlain and Daladier in 1938?
VON SCHIRACH: No.
DR. SAUTER: And what was your opinion?
VON SCHIRACH: I regarded that agreement as the basis for peace, and it was my firm conviction that Hitler would keep that agreement.