The Nuremberg Interviews (44 page)

What were some of the Nazi propaganda slogans against the Russians? “ ‘Reign of Terror.’ ‘No Culture.’ ‘No Individual Rights.’ ‘The Stakhanovite System.’
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Our workmen always criticized this system. I suppose you know about it? If a Russian workman comes late to work once, he receives not a warning but punishment. And if he comes late three times in a row, he is sent to Siberia without an investigation. That is a fact because I have talked to young German engineers. It is a fact. I heard it from engineers who worked in Russia.”

Were they German engineers? “Yes, yes, German engineers.

“An Allied-Russian war would be the end of Germany. Germany would be the battleground. Anyone hoping for a revival of Nazism through such a war is an idiot.

“But what I would like to know is whether Europe is going to be Bolshevistic or European.” Just what do you mean by European? “By European I mean western culture and the western standard of living.”

Did you do much reading as a young man? “Yes, I had access to large libraries. I always read for two or three hours daily — it was a habit. During the last five years of my life in Vienna I had hardly a spare minute, but I acquired the custom of reading between two a.m. and four a.m., and then I would go back to sleep again. This was to keep up my spiritual well-being.” What type of reading did you do? “In the last two years, I read several books by Churchill. I also read English and German classical literature. Goethe and Shakespeare were always my favorites.” Did you ever read any French literature — Zola, for instance? “I read world literature and I read French romances in the originals. I had quite a profound knowledge — no, that sounds conceited, but I did have a profound interest in everything spiritual.

“My idea of leading youth can be seen in two ways. People can say, if they choose, that the Hitler Youth was just a form of Nazi ideology in a form to be understood by youth. But I developed a special idea of education which others before me had been working on for years.

“The idea of self-leadership, of self-responsibility, the idea of a state of youth within a larger state is not my own. It began with the schools of Hermann Lietz. Lietz founded a new type of school system in 1898, consisting of ten or twelve schools. They were what you might call country boarding schools. The first school was founded in Ilsenburg.

“Lietz was a student of Friedrich Froebel, as well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. His idea was to overcome dangers which he saw in the industrial centers, such as large cities, by uniting youth, not only in school tasks but in other things. So, for example, we did work together with boys, built homes, carpenter shops, plumbing shops, and the like. The schools were located on estates which had their own gardens, cattle, et cetera. And so the school itself was a picture in miniature of a state. Every boy had his function within this miniature state. But they also had their lessons to learn. The important thing was that they were working for the community. You can call it Communist or socialist or democratic in the modern sense of the term. It was developed from Pestalozzi, Rousseau, and Froebel eight years before Lietz. But Lietz developed and formulated and put into practice these theories.

“I myself as a young boy attended a school of that type. It was not a Lietz school, but it was directed by a man who was associated with Lietz. I learned many things which other boys didn’t know. I always thought of self-education and self-leadership of youth, and then along came the Nazi Party, which gave me the opportunity of putting my ideas into practice at home. I developed this idea of the youth state.

“The main drawback of the Lietz schools was that cities and industries had dangerous influences on youth — well, Lietz just let that problem lie untouched. The boys and girls he had in school — it was a coeducational system, which I believe in firmly — were all children of wealthy parents. And the schools themselves were expensive to attend, so that the drawback was that these were all children of one class, the children of wealthy people.

“So I tried to build up something which brought together all classes of youth. It was a youth state which included boys of the working classes as well as children from aristocratic families: youth would be discovered by youth itself. Therefore, at the top leadership it would be possible to have a representative in every ministry who was concerned about the life of young people.

“Our fight for a holiday of eighteen days per year for every young man was successful. We could only reach these things by the power of young people, in every legislative community where a man working on youth problems always came from the community of youth itself. These things will not be seen accurately in these times when Nazis and Nazism are criticized and the Hitler Youth is merely looked at as just a part of Nazism. But in a few years when the world has quieted down, the positive features of my program will be recognized. My program will not survive just as Nazism has not survived, and I recognize that the latter is quite dead, but some things will be recognized in my youth program.

“A realization of my program in some ways means perfect democracy. That is strange, isn’t it?” Schirach smiled charmingly as he asked me this paradoxical question. How about racial and national chauvinism? “There is nationalism connected to my program because it is a youth movement of its time. National Socialism was the only possibility for this movement to develop. But if you want to understand the amazing development of the youth movement in the past ten years, you must see and notice the effect on a boy of ten or twelve years of age. Such a boy is not interested in politics. One must give him something useful. The idea of self-leadership and self-government — the responsibility of every boy for himself and his little job — the youth state that was constructed — all of these ideas were half developed, but essential. One must not say that the Nazi youth movement was just an appendage of the Nazi Party.

“Because if you say that, they will never believe it. I mean the people. They got something, especially the working classes, or they would not have accepted my program so enthusiastically. The working classes realized that they had a possibility to move up.” It seems to me paradoxical. “Yes, it is paradoxical that in a totalitarian state something is invented with characteristically democratic features.”

Do you think that if Germany had won the war, your youth movement would have made Nazism more democratic? “The idea of Germany winning the world war is absurd. I did think that the utmost we could achieve would be a peace with acknowledgment through Great Britain and America. And as for the Polish question, we would have had to draw back and permit an international solution of the Polish question. I thought at the time that the German-Russian pact was very dubious. The world should not have been outmaneuvered by Nazism. At any rate, for
ten years after such a war or such a peace, there would have been a quieter time.”

And your movement — the Hitler Youth — would that serve to temper Nazism? “Yes, many features in the youth movement were critical of National Socialism. I spoke with the youths who were in Russia and they told me that the way we treated the Russians in the occupied areas was wrong. They said we cannot say that the Russians are inferior to the Germans. I remember how many German boys told me how clean the Russian girls were both physically and in their mental attitudes. I remember some of my German boys showing me many schoolbooks from the Russian schools which were printed in the Russian language; they even contained poems.
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“In Nazism as a whole there was no opportunity to express our opinions on a parliamentarian basis. Boys accustomed to the youth movement could not become accustomed to this severe form of National Socialism. Youth was accustomed to live in camps, to hike together, and it was natural for things to be discussed among the young which in the older generation would simply have been obeyed. Of course, boys and girls obeyed but they could tell their young leader what was wrong. We grew up as a generation of leaders. I started my work in the youth movement in 1930, just sixteen years ago. I am thirty-eight now, and I was twenty-two then. The boys I worked with were twenty. There were a few thousand girls and we were accustomed to talking about everything that concerned us. I never gave an order except where it was needed for the functioning of the organization. It was similar to a board of directors in a plant. We would sit down and have a chat, opinions would be offered, but finally the general director announces that we will do it in such and such a way.”

Schirach’s defense ended recently. Today was Sunday and we had our usual afternoon conversation. He obviously wanted to get away from discussing his defense, with which he was not completely satisfied, and significantly he asked me whether I had yet interviewed Oswald Pohl, the chief of the concentration camps, who was recently imprisoned and interned in the Nuremberg prison.

I said I had interviewed Pohl on several occasions. Schirach asked me for my opinion of the man and I said I would rather not indulge in characterizations
of persons who might subsequently be defendants and that fundamentally my opinion of Pohl was not as yet tested. Schirach realized that I was evading his question, incidentally a not unusual type of question-in-reverse which he employs. He obviously wanted me to ask him what he thought about Pohl. I did so. “Pohl I did not know at all except, of course, that I had heard of him and perhaps I did see him occasionally at the Führer’s headquarters or at large meetings. But that a man could be in charge of all the concentration camps in Germany, Himmler’s right-hand man without a doubt, making him one of the great criminals of our age — what sort of a man is he? Does he talk? Does he proclaim innocence like Kaltenbrunner? I really can’t understand such people.”

I told him that Pohl was adopting the usual attitude, namely, that he did not deny knowledge of exterminations and atrocities within the camps, but explained them on the basis of his merely obeying the orders of Himmler, and excusing himself by stating that he was not personally responsible for the extermination program, which was executed by one of his deputies, Richard Gluecks.
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Schirach made a wry face and said, “Horrible.”

That seemed to take care of Pohl as far as Schirach was concerned. He had apparently wanted to impress me with the fact that he disapproved of such people as Pohl, Kaltenbrunner, and the other agents and deputies of Himmler. He did not want to continue discussing the matter and I asked him to tell me anything that came into his head.

We talked of various things thereafter, mostly about the termination of the cases against the defendants and their individual defenses of them. I asked him for his opinion about Bormann, who was being tried in absentia, whose defense lay in the hands of the court-appointed lawyer Dr. Friedrich Bergold. “I am firmly convinced that Bormann will show up — that either the Americans or the Russians have him in custody and will try to create a sensation, for news effect, when his case comes up, and suddenly produce him. I once heard that Bormann had given himself up to the Russians. Bormann is being treated in absentia just as if he were sitting in the dock. He left Berlin in a tank. His secretary made a statement that she saw this tank struck by shells and that Bormann was killed. I doubt if one could take Bormann’s secretary’s word for what was happening.”

He went on to describe Bormann insofar as he knew him. “It is difficult
to describe such a character. He was not highly educated but he was able and extremely industrious in technical office work. He was also extremely unscrupulous and very practical. His practicality was obvious even in his speech and appearance. He was a short, stocky man, quite fat, with an oxlike character. He had been a schoolteacher early in his career just as Streicher had been a schoolteacher, so you can see that being a schoolteacher is no sign of education.

“Technically and officially Bormann was the head of the party. Besides that, however, he was in reality the prime minister because all of Hitler’s orders went through his hands. Bormann’s real period of power began in 1941, although long before that, as far back as 1937, he had had a strong personal influence on Hitler. It was very strange. You know he was the chief of staff under Hess, but even while Hess was his superior, Bormann was much closer to Hitler in the hierarchy than was Hess. I think that Hess lost all his power because Bormann took it away from him, despite the fact that Hess was Bormann’s superior. Bormann virtually became Hess’s boss.

“Bormann entered party history in 1929 when he came to Munich. Before that he lived in my hometown of Weimar and used to chauffeur Sauckel, when the latter made propaganda and campaign speeches in Thuringia. Bormann at that time worked for Sauckel, and in a very minor, subordinate position. In 1929 he began doing financial work within the party. He continued with this task until 1933, when Hess made him his chief of staff.”

We talked about his recent defense. I asked him what he thought of the cross-examination, which was mainly performed by the American prosecutor Dodd. Schirach smiled and said, “I am not good at cross-examination. As far as youth education is concerned, I thought that putting all the songs that were sung before me was a little apart from the essential matter. For example, they put a song before me entitled ‘Put the Red Hand on the Roof of the Cloister.’ That is a song from the sixteenth century and was originally sung by Lutheran peasants fighting against cloisters and the Catholic bishops. It’s a story of the Lutherans who were fighting for their rise against the princes and was written in 1525. It will be sung as long as the German language continues.

“Dodd is the most skillful of the prosecuting attorneys. He really does research and works, whereas Justice Jackson is more of a supervisor and doesn’t know the details as does Dodd. That was one of the reasons why the cross-examination of Goering by Jackson didn’t work.

“After I made the statement in court about Hitler being a milliontimes murderer and my other statements about the fallacy and complete wrongness of anti-Semitism, I have rethought all the ideas which directed me during the last fifteen or twenty years of my life. Having come to the conclusion that racial policy as a whole is one of the greatest menaces to mankind, I now also try to see in what way all these different men were wrong in what they said, not only as far as Jewish influence but regarding other matters. I am still thinking about it. I must deliberate and try to get a real understanding of the errors of our ways.