The Nuremberg Interviews (45 page)

“What I was working for was the socialist idea, which I still hold. But I understand socialism in a different form than the older generation did. In fact, I think I don’t have to understand so many of my social ideas in that direction. What is necessary is to solve the problems of the working class and to work toward the welfare of those who have difficulty and struggle for a living. There is the everlasting question of how to educate youth so that the poor boy may have the chance to get into government or other positions — and I think it’s worth fighting for.

“Now as you have often asked me and as I have been thinking about many months, I want to talk about the leadership principle in the youth movement. We had something quite different than in the state. We discussed problems freely and only then were orders given, which were considered correct by the leaders on down to the lowest member of the Hitler Youth. Such was not the fashion in the party or in the state. But in retrospect, and realizing where we have come to, I am absolutely sure that a real system of government must prevent one man or twenty or thirty men from getting all the power of the state into their hands. Power is what spoils people. Yes, it seems to me that the seeking after power is the great danger and the great corrupter of mankind.

“Some of the defendants say that dictatorship can be good if there is a good dictator. But I say that a man cannot stay good if he becomes a dictator. Authoritarianism is a system that destroys man’s morality. If you take a saint and give him power, he will change into a Hitler or a devil.” Did Schirach think that perhaps in his own case this psychological phenomenon held true? “In my own life, my way of living was so different that it didn’t affect me. I know what happened in other districts — something must have been different in my way of living. Probably my friends saved me from that. I lived with people who had varied opinions, some of whom did not accept my Nazi views. I encouraged this. If a man said something that was critical of me or my ideas, I wouldn’t consider him an enemy.”

I asked him about the somewhat touchy subject of his removal of Jews from Vienna. Schirach was as smooth and rationalizing as ever. “In the case of Seyss-Inquart the correspondence between him and Himmler about the sending away of Jews was brought up in court. This occurred long before I went there. Once there were 190,000 Jews in Vienna, but when I went there, there were only 60,000. These are plain facts. Hitler told me that he wanted to send all the Jews away. I admit that I committed what might be called a crime because under my aegis 60,000 Jews were sent away, but it must be stressed that this occurred after 130,000 had been removed from Vienna.

“The trouble was that my thinking and reasoning were not deep enough. Since 1938 I thought that it was best to have all the Jews of Europe out of the reach of Dr. Goebbels and his sudden attacks. I thought that if the Jews were brought to Poland, where they could live like any other human beings, it would be quite a good idea — at least better than having them in Germany, where you never knew what might happen. Goebbels would make a new speech and the shops of the Jews would be smashed, Jews would be rushed off to concentration camps, many would be killed, and so forth. The removal of Jews from Vienna, one must recall, was done by the special office of Heydrich, who had his representative in Vienna. I think that this representative, whose name was Alois Brunner, was put to death a few weeks ago after trial by an Austrian court.
⁴

“And now I come to my great guilt. I made that stupid speech once where I said, ‘I have sent these Jews away to the East,’ which seems to be a confession made in public that I was doing this. It is so hard to explain. However, it was part of a big action initiated by Himmler, but that doesn’t make it any better. It doesn’t throw a good light on the party, if I claim that by doing this I kept my opponents quiet. That happens to be the truth. Kaltenbrunner said that the western Nazis were less radical, but my opinion is that the Nazis of Austria were more radical. I always had to meet criticism from below in Austria, charges that I was not being active enough and not putting through National Socialist ideas.

“I am just telling the whole story as it is. If in later years you have the opportunity to talk to some decent people from Vienna who were once in party work, they will confirm it. I was in a difficult position. I went to Austria when great difficulties existed between Austrians and Germans. I had to calm people who had been insulted and hurt by Josef Buerckel,
and at the same time I had to calm the violent Center Group of the Austrian Nazi Party. They assassinated Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in 1934. They were radicals and anarchists, and the thing they always pointed at was my weak stand on the Jewish question.

“For that reason I always thought that the idea of Hitler’s sending the Jews away from Vienna was reasonable because the violent group would always cause conflicts. And so with this speech to which I referred a moment ago, I put in that bad sentence which is now held against me, in order to take the wind out of the sails of people over all these shoutings about my not going against the Jews. If you read all of my books and speeches, there is nothing of that connection in them. In the preceding twenty years prior to that speech, I never made such statements. Unfortunately, during my cross-examination I couldn’t make that point. The only thing I could do was to state that it was true that some songs, like the ‘Horst Wessel,’ were sung by SA men and not primarily by the Hitler Youth.

“I tried to be quite truthful about this because it bothered me. The idea that people probably died as a result of my evacuation of fifty or sixty thousand Jews from Vienna is something terrible for me to think about. Actually I have no feeling of guilt about sending them away, but the speech identified myself with such a dirty criminal step. Now I would say that the deportation of people anyhow, in any way, for any reason, is something terrible and criminal. But you must remember that my reaction to the events of November 9 and 10, 1938, was a good one. I claim that it is to my credit that I kept the Youth out of any of that dirty work. I think it is something positive in my favor. I forbade them from participating in those actions. My idea always was that the critical things were laws against the Jews, and that there was no possibility left for the Jews to live securely in Germany after those laws were passed.”

Were there not other opponents to Nazism than the Jews? “Undoubtedly. Most of them who were politically opposed to Nazism were called Communists and were confined to concentration camps indefinitely at the very beginning, in 1933 and 1934. It is interesting that I personally could walk through factories where laborers worked, and although they may have hated my politics, they never assaulted me because I think that they realized I was essentially a socialist and they knew after a while that I always saw to it that the workingpeople had what they needed. Probably now the Austrian people are talking about their resistance movements
or their underground opposition to the Nazis. Such talk is all fibs and fantasy. I had no difficulties in Vienna. I don’t know what difficulties the Gestapo men encountered in individual cases of anarchists or Communists, although such individuals were probably arrested and tried legally before a court. But in a political way these opposition groups were hardly noticeable in Vienna. The great mass of Viennese and Austrians were heartily in favor of the Nazis and our policies.

“There is one exception to my last remark in that when I first went to Vienna in 1940, there did exist a strong political feeling against the Reich. I think I was partly successful in overcoming this opposition. I got on quite well with the Viennese and had lots of friends there. The whole story would have been different if Hitler had sent me to Vienna in the very beginning, instead of first sending Odilo Globocnik and Josef Buerckel and other awful people like them.
⁵

“At first, Buerckel had no difficulties because he was the first man appointed and the people welcomed him as a representative of Nazism, which they approved. Soon he began to hurt the feelings of the Viennese. There is a certain way many Germans had of talking about Austrians — especially in Prussia — which made an Austrian boil and which even I myself would become enraged about. The German is too much in the habit of saying, ‘He is just an Austrian,’ in a derogatory fashion.

“Buerckel’s followers and officials talked in this way and were generally always tactless. Then came Buerckel’s action against Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, which was idiotic. Innitzer’s palace was stoned and stormed and many of his fine ecclesiastical pictures and books were ruined. When I arrived, I stopped all that nonsense. The feeling among the radical group of the party in Austria was strong against Catholicism. I broke down the idea of demonstrations, and I forbade speeches against the church and other actions which might violate the feelings of the Austrian people.

“Vienna is the most complicated political place and it is not easy to work there. I soon felt entirely at home in that environment nevertheless. In fact, I identified myself so much with the Austrian people that my feelings toward Germany became very different. Austria was divided into various administrative districts, which was one of the great political mistakes made by Hitler. Hitler wanted to break the supposed danger that might derive from a single administrative district in Austria. He was always afraid of having any single entity become too strong. My district,
for instance, stopped immediately outside of Vienna. Hitler cooperated with August Eigruber, who was the party district administrator of the upper Danube, and Hitler tried to make Linz the principal city of Austria. That was ridiculous, too, because Linz was just a provincial town. Hitler spent millions on buildings, and on the Hermann Goering Works in Linz.

“Eigruber was here in this prison in Nuremberg, but he has been transferred and brought to trial somewhere else. He was very fanatical, especially toward the end, when he turned against people and hanged them right and left for very little cause. The notorious concentration camp of Mauthausen was in his district. Eigruber is probably dead by now. He was only thirty-nine, but he looked about fifty-five. He was of the Globocnik-Bormann type.”
⁶

Schirach married in 1932 the daughter of Hitler’s favorite photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. His wife, six years his junior, was eighteen years of age at the time of their marriage. “I’d known her since she was sixteen. It was entirely a love affair. I met her first and then met her father, who introduced us formally. Professor Hoffmann was astonished when I asked him for his daughter’s hand. I don’t think he was aware that I was in love with her. My parents met her prior to our marriage when I took her to Weimar to introduce her to them. That was two years before we married. In the beginning my mother didn’t like her very much, but later, when our children began coming, the old grandmotherly feeling arose and later my mother got to know my wife better and to like her very much.”

There were four children: a daughter, thirteen years of age, and three boys, eleven, eight, and four.

“My mother was a very rich woman, but nevertheless I always stood on my own feet and never accepted a penny from my family. As a student I worked for a newspaper and earned money. In 1932 I was already leader of the Hitler Youth. That same year, before my marriage, I was the youngest member of the Reichstag. After 1933 the Reichstag had no importance. Of course, it met at times to accept laws unanimously, but its real function was negligible. I had one year of being a member of a republican parliament, from 1932 to 1933. It was a terrible period. Members of the Reichstag threw ink at each other and there were heated arguments and debates. You can’t imagine what things went on. It was a time of violent antagonism in political life.”

He said that in 1943, when his wife and he spent a few days at Hitler’s home in Berchtesgaden, life was so unbearable because of the peculiarity of Hitler’s living schedule that both he and his wife had to leave prematurely, utilizing some excuse that they had to go home to their children. He said that at that time his wife had remarked to him that she was certain Hitler was insane. Schirach described the visit as a combination social and political one. There were many other guests present. The visitors had to follow the schedule of Hitler insofar as meals were concerned, and this was very erratic. For example, Hitler would have breakfast sometimes at three o’clock in the afternoon, lunch at eight o’clock in the evening, and dinner sometime around midnight. On the following day, the schedule of meals might be quite different, depending on Hitler’s whim.

At that same visit to Berchtesgaden, Schirach noted that Hitler was impervious to outside influence, even during a conversation. The Führer would either remain completely silent during a meal or hold forth at great length, soliloquizing, and brooking no comment or opinion from his guests. Sometimes between courses Hitler would speak for forty-five minutes or an hour, as if he were making a public address. Schirach said that the entire performance during the two or three days’ visit was difficult and intolerable.

He said that his wife was quite uninhibited and would usually express her opinions about anyone quite freely, but that it was impossible for even her to tell Hitler anything. He did credit his wife with having recognized Hitler’s abnormality and cruel nature years before he himself recognized it.

Albert Speer
1905–1981

Albert Speer was Hitler’s architect from 1937, and minister for armaments and war production from 1942 to 1945. Tried at Nuremberg and found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, he was sentenced on September 30, 1946, to twenty years’ imprisonment, and released from Spandau prison in 1966.