VON SCHIRACH: A few youth leaders who had worked on my staff for a number of years were made civil servants through me. I did not receive a single official from any ministry to deal with matters relating to the youth organization. The entire high Reich office, if I remember correctly, consisted of no more than five officials. It was the smallest of the high Reich offices, something I was particularly proud of. We carried out a very large task with a minimum of personnel.
DR. SAUTER: And now, Witness, I want to come to a subject which is going to be rather extensive and that is the affidavit by Gregor Ziemer, which you have already mentioned. It is a very lengthy affidavit which has been presented by the Prosecution under Document Number 2441-PS.
Witness, what do you have to say in detail with regard to that affidavit? Do you know it? Do you know this man Gregor Ziemer?
VON SCHIRACH: No.
DR. SAUTER: Have you found out who he is and from where he gathered his alleged knowledge?
VON SCHIRACH: I gather from the affidavit that Herr Ziemer before the war was headmaster of the American school in Berlin and that he has written a book which apparently deals with youth and school education in Germany. This affidavit is an extract from that book.
The affidavit as such, if you regard it in its entirety, has, I believe, more importance as propaganda than as an impartial judgment.
I want to start by quoting something from the very first page, which is the page containing Ziemer’s affidavit, and in the last paragraph it says that street fights took place outside the American school between the Jewish children going to this school and the local youngsters. I need not deal with the difficulties which the school itself had, because that was not part of my department. But these street fights took place outside the school, and I think I ought to say something about them. I never heard anything about these clashes, but I should have heard about them under all circumstances, because during most of 1938 I was in Berlin. I should have heard of them first through the youth organization itself, because the senior youth leaders would have been obliged to report to me if such incidents had taken place.
Furthermore, I would have had to hear about it through the Foreign Office, because if youngsters from the American colony had been molested, protests would certainly have gone through the Embassy to the Foreign Office, and these protests would without fail have been passed on to me at once or reported to me by telephone.
I can only imagine that the whole affair is a very gross exaggeration. The American Ambassador Wilson even had breakfast with me—I think in the spring of 1939, and I do not think I am wrong about the date—in Gatow.