That this was really Schirach’s opinion is also substantiated by the statement which Schirach made here on the morning of 24 May 1946, when he described without reservation the crimes committed by Hitler as a shameful episode in German history, as a crime which fills every German with shame; that statement in which he openly states that Auschwitz must signify the end of any and every racial and anti-Semitic policy. That statement here in this courtroom came from the bottom of the heart of the Defendant Schirach; it was the result of the terrible disclosures which this Trial brought to him also, and Schirach made this statement here openly before the public in order to bring back German youth from a wrong path to the road of justice and tolerance.
Gentlemen, I would now like to bring to your attention the more important accusations which have been raised against Schirach, and the major results which the evidence has produced in the various points. The Defendant Schirach is first of all accused of the fact that before the seizure of power, that is, before the year 1933, he actively promoted the National Socialist Party and the youth organization affiliated with it and that he thereby contributed to the rise of the Party to power. He had been, as stated in the trial brief, a close and abject follower of Hitler; he had stood in blind loyalty to Hitler and the latter’s National Socialist world of thinking; and he had, as leader of the student’s league, led the students ideologically and politically to National Socialism and won them over to it.
All this, if Your Honors please, is not denied by Schirach in any manner. He has done what he is being accused of in this respect; this he confesses openly, and for this he naturally takes responsibility. The only thing which he denies with regard to this, and all the more emphatically with regard to the later period, is the accusation that he participated in a conspiracy. Schirach himself pointed out that the Leadership Principle and dictatorship in their character and their theory are absolutely incompatible with the idea of a conspiracy, and a conspiracy appears to him a logical impossibility if many millions of members are to be included and when its existence and aims lie exposed before the country concerned as well as before the world. We furthermore know from the results of this Trial that Hitler, aside from Bormann and Himmler, did not have a single friend or adviser with whom he discussed his plans and aims; on the contrary he carried the Leadership Principle to the furthest extreme. He dispensed with all advisory meetings or discussions which might have affected his decisions in any way, reaching his decisions all by himself without even listening to the opinion of those closest to him. For him it was a matter of orders on his own part, and unconditional obedience on that of the others. I wish to refrain from further statements about that chapter, but that is what the “conspiracy” really looked like; and all of us who have witnessed this Trial would never have felt this ultra-radical application of the Leadership Principle to be possible had not all the defendants and all the witnesses familiar with the facts, in complete agreement and without a single exception, presented the same picture to us over and over again.
Now Schirach is not denying at all that already in his very early years he came completely under the influence of Hitler, that he placed himself with his whole young personality at the service of these ideas, and that at the time, as stated quite correctly in the Indictment, he was devoted to Hitler with unconditional loyalty.
If this was a crime on the part of young Schirach, a crime which millions of older, more experienced, mature Germans have committed with him, then you, as his judges, may condemn him for this if our code of law furnishes a legal basis for it. That would be but a further disappointment in addition to the many others which he has been experiencing for years. Schirach knows today that he gave loyal support unto the end to a man who did not deserve it; and he also knows today that the ideas, about which he was enthusiastic in his young years and for which he sacrificed himself, led in practice to ends of which he himself had never dreamed.
But even the Schirach of today, purged by many bitter experiences, cannot see any criminal act in the activity of his younger years which he carried out in good faith, together with millions of other Germans, for Hitler and his Party. For the Party at that time appeared quite legal to him; Schirach never had any doubt that it also came into power by legal means. The seizure of power by the Party, the appointment of Hitler as Reich Chancellor by Reich President Von Hindenburg, the winning of the majority of the people for the Party by repeated elections, all this confirmed to young Schirach again and again the legality of the movement he had joined. If today he were to be punished because he acknowledged as his Führer this same Hitler whom millions of Germans and all the countries of the world recognized as legal head of the State, Schirach would never be able to acknowledge such a decision as being just. In spite of the severe judgment which he himself has pronounced in this courtroom on Hitler according to his personal conviction, he would consider himself a victim of his political convictions if he were to be sentenced because, as a young enthusiastic man, he joined the National Socialist Party and collaborated in its construction and seizure of power. At the time he did not look upon that as a crime but from his standpoint considered it his patriotic duty.
The second and by far more important accusation which has been raised against the Defendant Von Schirach is to the effect that he, as Reich Youth Leader in the years 1932 to 1940, to quote the Indictment literally, “poisoned the thought of youth with Nazi ideology and especially trained it for aggressive war.” Schirach has always contested this claim emphatically, and this claim has not been substantiated by the results of the evidence either.
The law on the Hitler Youth of 1936 described Schirach’s task as Reich Youth Leader as being “to educate youth, outside the parental home and outside school, physically, intellectually, and morally for service to the people and to the national community in the spirit of National Socialism through the Hitler Youth movement and its leader,” that is, the Defendant Von Schirach. This was the program. This program is repeated word for word in the enactment decree of 1939, which was postponed for so long—3 years—because Schirach did not want to introduce compulsory membership until the movement already practically included the entire German youth on the basis of voluntary membership, so that future joining by compulsion would exist on paper only.
The Hitler Youth program, as it was formulated by Schirach in his speeches and writings—and no other program of the Hitler Youth exists—does not contain a single word which would point toward military education of youth, much less an education in aggressive warfare; nor does in practice the education of youth, in Schirach’s opinion, in any way give evidence of a military education of German youth for such a purpose. In that respect the point was stressed by the Prosecution that the Hitler Youth movement was organized in various detachments and divisions. That is true, although the designations listed by the Prosecution are not correct and although they have not the slightest reference to military formations. But in the last analysis every youth movement the world over will show a classification into smaller or larger units; each of these units naturally will also need a name and some responsible leader. As in the other countries, so also in the German Hitler Youth the leader of the unit was discernible by some sign of his rank, be it a leader’s cord, stars, or other insignia of rank. This naturally has nothing to do with the military character of youth education.
From personal familiarity with the practice in foreign countries Schirach knows that foreign youth organizations, in Switzerland as well as in France and other countries, have similar classifications and similar insignia, although it never occurred to us so far to make that a reason for considering such foreign youth organizations as military associations.