VON SCHIRACH: I believe that we are dealing with the decree of the year 1936.
DR. SAUTER: Autumn 1936?
VON SCHIRACH: Autumn 1936. According to that, Jewish youth organizations were to exist under the official supervision of the Reich Youth Leader, who controlled all the youth of Germany, and Jewish youth would be able to carry out their own youth education autonomously.
DR. SAUTER: It says in that decree, inter alia—I quote one sentence only from Document Schirach-136 of the Schirach document book:
“Today in its youth, Judaism already assumes that special, isolated position, free within its own boundaries, which at some future date Judaism will occupy within the German State and in the economy of Germany and which it has already occupied to a great extent.”
Witness, at about the same time, or shortly before then, the so-called Nuremberg Laws had been promulgated, those racial laws which we have frequently heard mentioned here.
Did you help pass these laws, and how did you personally judge these laws?
VON SCHIRACH: I had no part in the drafting of these laws. In my room at the Hotel Deutscher Hof, here in Nuremberg, I was surprised to find a slip of paper stating that there would be a Reichstag meeting on the next day and that it would take place in Nuremberg. At that Reichstag meeting, at which I was present, the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated. I do not know to this day how they were drafted. I assume that Hitler himself determined their contents. I can tell you no more about them.
DR. SAUTER: Can you state on your oath, and with a clear conscience, that before these laws were published you had not known of the plan for such laws, although you had been Reich Youth Leader and Reichsleiter?
VON SCHIRACH: Yes.