“Socialism does not mean taking the fruits of his work away from one person in order to give everybody something produced by the work of one individual. Everyone shall work, but everyone shall also harvest the fruits of his work. Nor must one person be allowed to get rich while thousands of others must suffer want for his sake. Whoever exploits his workers and spoliates the community in order to fill his cash box is an enemy of the German people” (Document Schirach-55).
That ends the quotation describing the attitude of Von Schirach at that time.
Schirach has pointed out again and again in his numerous writings, articles, and speeches, which have been collected in the document book and have been submitted to the Tribunal, that, to use his expression, he did not desire any “pseudo-military drill,” which would only spoil the joy of the young people in their movement.
The training of the young people in small-bore shooting was in line with the training in all sports activities and corresponded to the inclination of the boys, in all countries, who are particularly interested in the sport of shooting. But this training played a very minor role in volume and importance by comparison with the greater aims which Schirach pursued in the Hitler Youth movement, about which not only Schirach but the other witnesses examined give as clear a testimony as the writings and speeches of Von Schirach. These aims of the Hitler Youth education shall be listed here briefly as they have been demonstrated by the presentation of evidence; Schirach is naturally not accused in connection with these other aims of the Hitler Youth education, but one must nevertheless consider and evaluate them when desiring to obtain a total picture of his personality, his activity, and his plans.
Apart from this education of youth in terms of comradeship and of socialism in the sense of overcoming class distinction, Schirach had, as he explained here, primarily four aims in mind:
First the training of youth in the various types of sports, and in connection therewith juvenile health supervision; this branch of youth education took up a very large part of Hitler Youth activities, and the fact that German youth obtained such an unexpected success at the Olympic Games in 1936 was to a certain extent due to the activity of the Hitler Youth leadership in co-operation with the Reich Sports Leader Von Tschammer-Osten.
Another aim was postgraduate training and advancement of working youth and the improvement of the position of adolescent wage earners through youth legislation, particularly by prohibiting night work, increasing spare time, granting paid vacations, prohibiting child labor, raising the protected age of adolescents, et cetera. Advanced vocational training was promoted so successfully that finally more than a million boys and girls entered for the annual occupational competitions, and from year to year the average performance in each branch rose very considerably.
A third main aim of youth education was the promotion of love of nature, far away from the dens of iniquity of large cities, through hiking trips and in youth hostels. Thousands of youth homes and youth hostels were built in the course of these years on Schirach’s initiative out of the Hitler Youth movement’s own funds, in order to get the young people out of the large cities with their temptations and vices and return them to rural life to show them the beauties of the homeland and to afford a vacation to even the poorest child.
But Schirach concentrated his chief attention on the fourth goal of youth education, namely, co-operation with the youth of other nations; and this activity is a particularly suitable test for the question as to whether one can accuse the Defendant Von Schirach of having taken part in the planning of wars of aggression and of having committed crimes against peace. Schirach has told us here on the witness stand that time and again, both in summer and winter of every year, foreign youth groups were the guests of German youth; and it is shown by the documents in Von Schirach’s document book that, for instance, already in the year 1936 no less than 200,000 foreign youths received overnight lodgings in German youth hostels, and correspondingly year after year German youth delegations went abroad, especially to England and France, in order to enable young people to get acquainted with and respect one another. Those very endeavors of Schirach’s, which would be absolutely incompatible with any intention to prepare wars of aggression, received unreserved recognition abroad before the war. In 1937 in one of the special numbers of the Hitler Youth magazine Wille und Macht dedicated to this task of understanding, which was also published in French and circulated very widely in France and which is quoted here only as an example, the French Prime Minister Chautemps—I have the evidence in the document book—declared his willingness, as head of the French Government, to promote these peaceful meetings.
“I wish”—he wrote—“that the young men of both nations could live every year side by side by the thousands and in this way learn to know, to understand, and to respect each other.” And further: