These words make it clear enough that Raeder could not resist either.
Accordingly, only the question remains: Is it ever a soldier’s duty to revolt—to resort to open mutiny? This question will be denied by every commander all over the world and likewise by every other person with a sole exception, namely, if it concerns the case of a dictator commanding the commission of a crime, the criminality of which is recognized by the military commander himself. Accordingly Raeder could be made responsible for a military crime only, but not for a political one, because for the political crime the dictator himself must answer. When the Prosecution came to the opposite conclusion regarding Raeder, this was due—as I have already emphasized in my introduction—only to their misconception of the actual and juridical facts; they regarded Raeder as politician and soldier. But he was a soldier only. He lived for the Navy alone, for the welfare of the Navy, for which he is now equally prepared to bear responsibility to the full extent. He led the Navy along uniform lines and, aided by his officer-corps, taught it those decent views and that form of chivalrous fighting which humanity expects of a soldier. It must not be allowed to happen that, as a result of the deeds of a Hitler and his National Socialism, the officers and soldiers of this Navy be defamed by hearing their highest-ranking officer declared a criminal. From a historical viewpoint Raeder may be guilty, because he, like many others within the country and abroad, did not recognize or see through Hitler and did not have the strength to resist the dynamic strength of a Hitler; but such an omission is no crime. What Raeder did or left undone in his life occurred in the belief that he was acting correctly and that as a dutiful soldier he had to act in such a way.
Raeder is a highly esteemed officer who is no criminal; and he cannot be a criminal, since all his life he has lived honorably and as a Christian. A man who believes in God does not commit crimes, and a soldier who believes in God is not a war criminal.
I therefore ask the High Tribunal to acquit Admiral Dr. Erich Raeder on all points of the Indictment.
PRESIDENT: I call on Dr. Sauter for the Defendant Von Schirach.
DR. SAUTER: Gentlemen of the Tribunal, Baldur von Schirach, who at that time was Reich Youth Leader, in 1936 welcomed the guests to the Olympic Games in Berlin with the following words:
“Youth throws a bridge across all frontiers and seas! I call upon the Youth of the World and through them, upon Peace!”
And Baldur von Schirach, then Gauleiter of Vienna, said to Hitler in 1940: “Vienna cannot be conquered with bayonets, but only with music.”
Those two utterances are characteristic of the nature of this defendant. It is the task of the Defense to examine the evidence produced in this Trial for the purpose of ascertaining whether the same Baldur von Schirach, who expressed such thoughts, really committed those crimes against law and humanity with which he is charged by the Prosecution.
Schirach is the youngest defendant here. He is also, of all the defendants, the one who was by far the youngest when joining the Party, which he did when he was not yet 18. Those facts in themselves are perhaps of some significance in judging his case. When still at school he came under the spell of rising National Socialism; he was particularly attracted by the Socialist idea, which had already in his country school recognized no difference between the sons of fathers of different classes and professions; those boys around Schirach saw in the popular movement of the twenties in Germany a promise of the resurgence of our fatherland from the aftermath of the lost Great War into a happy future; and fate willed it that as early as 1925, when he was seventeen, Schirach came into personal contact with Hitler in Weimar, Goethe’s home. Hitler’s personality made a fascinating impression on young Schirach, as he himself admitted; the program for the National Community (Volksgemeinschaft), which Hitler had evolved at that time, met with Schirach’s wholehearted enthusiasm, because he thought he saw reproduced therein on a full-size scale that which he had personally experienced in a small way in the comradeship of the country school and in his youth organization. To him and his comrades Hitler appeared as the man who would open for the younger generation the road into the future; of him this younger generation had hopes for its prospects of work, its prospects of a secure existence, its prospects of a happy life. Thus the young man became a convinced National Socialist; this fact was the result of the environment in which he had spent his youth and which formed a soil only too fertile for the growth of that ideology which young Schirach embraced because at that period he held it to be the right one. This environment of his childhood and a vast amount of one-sided political literature, which the young man devoured in his thirst for knowledge, made of him, while still an inexperienced youth, also an anti-Semite. He certainly did not become an anti-Semite in the sense of those fanatics who ultimately did not shrink even from acts of violence and pogroms, of those who finally created an Auschwitz and murdered millions of Jews; but an anti-Semite in the moderate sense, who would merely curb Jewish influence in the government of the state and in cultural life but for the rest would leave untouched the freedom and rights of Jewish fellow citizens and who never thought of exterminating the Jewish people. At least that is the conception of Hitler’s anti-Semitism which young Schirach evolved during those years.