VON SCHIRACH: That was an office to the extent that the Reichsleiter office was concerned with youth work in the Party sector. The Youth Leader of the German Reich—that was Axmann as my successor—also had a field of activity in the State, and I too became competent for that by my appointment as inspector.
DR. SAUTER: How did your dismissal as Reich Youth Leader come about, and why were you called specifically to Vienna as Gauleiter? What can you tell us about that?
VON SCHIRACH: At the end of the French campaign, in which I participated as an infantryman, I was in Lyon when a wireless message from the Führer’s headquarters was received, and the chief of my company told me that I had to report to the Führer’s headquarters. I went there at once; and at the Führer’s headquarters, which was at that time situated in the Black Forest, I saw the Führer standing in the open speaking to Reich Foreign Minister Von Ribbentrop. I waited a while, maybe a quarter of an hour or 20 minutes, until the conversation had ended and then reported at once to Hitler and there, outside, before the Casino building where later we all had our meal together, he told me the following in about 10 minutes:
I should propose to him a successor for the leadership of the youth. He intended for me to take over the Reich Gau Vienna. I at once suggested my assistant, Axmann, who was not a man who advocated physical or military training but was concerned with social work among the youth, and that was most important to me. He accepted this proposal...
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Sauter, we need not go through Axmann’s qualifications, need we? Is it material to the Tribunal to know what his successor was like?
DR. SAUTER: Axmann? Axmann was successor as Reich Youth Leader.
THE PRESIDENT: What I was asking you was whether it was material for the Tribunal to know the qualities of Axmann. We have nothing to do with that.
DR. SAUTER: Herr Von Schirach, you can be more brief about that point, can you not?
VON SCHIRACH: Hitler then said that I should keep my job as Reich Leader of Youth Education and that I should assume at the same time the office of the Inspector of Youth and that I should go to Vienna as the successor to Bürckel. In Vienna, especially in the cultural field, serious difficulties had arisen; and therefore I was to direct my attention to the case of the institutions of culture, particularly of theaters, art galleries, libraries, and so forth; and I was to be especially concerned about the working class. I raised the objection that I could carry out that cultural work only if independent of Goebbels, and Hitler promised at that time that this independence would be fully safeguarded; but he did not keep that promise later.
And lastly he said that he was sending the Jewish population away from Vienna, that he had already informed Himmler or Heydrich—I do not remember exactly what he said—of his intentions, or at least would inform them. Vienna had to become a German city, and in that connection he even spoke of an evacuation of the Czech population.