VON PAPEN: I regard this accusation which you are making against me as one of the most tremendous for it violates my whole conception.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: Defendant, you remember you told the Tribunal just before the adjournment that you had introduced Cardinal Innitzer to Hitler when you went into Austria. You remember that after the statement to which Dr. Kubuschok has referred, that Cardinal Innitzer in a broadcast from Rome made it clear that he was only accepting the Nazi rule of Austria on certain conditions. Do you remember that?
VON PAPEN: Yes.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: Now, I would just like to see what happened to Cardinal Innitzer.
This is a new document, My Lord, D-903, which becomes GB-508. My Lord, this is a statement in the form of an affidavit from a priest, Dr. Weihbacher, which I only got from Vienna on 7 June.
You will see that this priest—well, at any rate I take it he is a priest; he is the archbishop’s secretary in the cathedral chapter. Let’s just look at it.
“On 8 October 1938”—that is a little over 6 months after you had arranged for Cardinal Innitzer to meet Hitler—“a serious attack was made by youthful demonstrators on the archbishop’s palace in Vienna. I was present during the attack and can therefore describe it from my own experience.”
Then he describes how they smashed window panes, broke in the gate. The priests took the archbishop into an inner room and hid him there. They took the cardinal to safety in the personalia archive and locked the iron door behind him, and:
“....then we two priests, seeing ourselves opposed by a crowd of invaders, personally took up a stand at the entrance to the cardinal’s house chapel in order to prevent any destruction from being wrought there at least.”
My Lord, this is about 10 lines from the foot of the page.