Trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremburg, 14 November 1945-1 October 1946, Volume 19 (part 4 of 4)
“We shall educate a youth before which the whole world shall tremble, rough, exacting, cruel youth. That is what I want. Our youth must possess all these qualities. It must be pitiless before the sight of suffering. It must be without weakness or softness. I want to see the glint of the wild animal in their eyes.”
And the Defendant Schirach instilled systematically the ideas of Hitlerism in the conscience of German youth and educated the German youth in the spirit of Hitler’s wishes, modeling them after the image of the arrant leaders of the Hitlerite gang.
During cross-examination, the Defendant Schirach was finally forced to admit that the youth of Germany was brought up in the spirit of the National Socialist idea; that members of the SA, officers of the German Armed Forces and the SS participated in their education; and that intense military training of the youth was being carried out in Germany. For this purpose special agreements were made between the Reich leaders of Hitlerjugend and the OKW, as represented by the Defendant Keitel and the Reichsführer SS Himmler, which provided for the education of youth in the spirit of aggressive militarism, and appropriate recruitment and the preparation of youth for the Armed Forces and the units of the SS.
The part played by the Defendant Von Schirach and his participation in the common conspiracy, in war crimes and crimes against humanity, are characterized best of all by the behavior of German youth brought up in Hitlerjugend during the war.
The Soviet Prosecution have presented to the Tribunal under Document Number USSR-6, in conformity with Article 21 of the Charter, a report of the Extraordinary State Commission about the crimes of the Germans on the territory of Lvov. This report records the declaration of the French citizen, Ida Vasseau, about the inhuman cruelty of the members of the Hitlerjugend against young children, whom they used as targets for shooting practice. In her written deposition of 16 May 1946, and also in her answers to the questionnaire of counsel for the Defendant Schirach, Ida Vasseau has fully confirmed this declaration.
Conclusive testimony about the actions of the members of the Hitlerjugend within the cadre of the Armed Forces was given by a German soldier, prisoner of war, Gert Knittel, himself a former member of the Hitlerjugend since 1938 on, who in 1942 at the age of 18 enlisted in German Army.
Describing his participation in numerous crimes, Gert Knittel declared:
“In the locality of Lishjask in June 1943 our company set fire to a house with a number of people in it ... All who tried to jump out of the house, we shot down, excepting one old woman whom we did not shoot, as she lost her mind under our very eyes ...”
For all these crimes the Defendant Von Schirach bears full responsibility together with this Gert Knittel and tens of thousands of others.
Schirach himself did not, of course, shoot, did not set on fire; but he did arm the German youth, morally corrupted them and prepared them for the perpetration of every atrocity.
But the activities of the Hitlerjugend during the war and of the Defendant Schirach were not limited only to these crimes. The Hitlerjugend actively participated in the preparation of the war of aggression by creating fifth columns in Poland and Yugoslavia; the official reports of the Polish and the Yugoslav Governments testify to this fact. The Hitlerjugend organization took an active part in the execution of all the measures undertaken by the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, and this is proved by the report of the Defendant Rosenberg, presented to the Tribunal as Document Number 1039-PS; it also actively participated in the deportation for slavery, from the occupied territories, of children between the ages of 10 and 14, which fact is proved by a document presented to the Tribunal under Document Number 031-PS.
In his capacity of Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter of Vienna, Schirach personally directed the eviction from Vienna of 60,000 Jews, who subsequently were exterminated in the concentration camps of Poland. The documents presented by the Prosecution—weekly reports addressed to Schirach—prove the fact that he was informed of all the numerous crimes perpetrated by the German Armed Forces and the occupational authorities in the East and, in particular, about the tragic fate of the tens of thousands of Jews deported from Vienna.
In 1940, the Defendant Schirach sent a telegram to Bormann, in which he demanded the destruction from the air of one of the cultural towns of Great Britain, as a reprisal for the murder of Heydrich, hangman of Bohemia and Moravia. This telegram is in itself a sufficiently vivid and convincing description of the moral aspect of Von Schirach’s character. Faithful to the Hitlerite clique right until the end, aware of all its criminal deeds, in which he himself had actively participated—the Defendant Von Schirach is one of the most sinister figures of the Third Reich.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal will adjourn now.
[The Tribunal adjourned until 30 July at 1000 hours.]
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Punctuation and spelling have been maintained except where obvious printer errors have occurred such as missing periods or commas for periods. English and American spellings occur throughout the document; however, American spellings are the rule, hence, “Defense” versus “Defence”. Unlike Blue Series volumes I and II, this volume includes French, German, Polish and Russian names and terms with diacriticals: hence Führer, Göring, etc. throughout.
Although some sentences may appear to have incorrect spellings or verb tenses, the original text has been maintained as it represents what the tribunal read into the record and reflects the actual translations between the German, English, French, and Russian documents presented in the trial.
An attempt has been made to produce this eBook in a format as close as possible to the original document presentation and layout.
As noted at the beginning of the volume: In respect to the presentation of the final pleas by Counsel for the Defense, the Tribunal in several instances directed that written speeches of excessive length be shortened for oral presentation in Court and that notice would be taken by the Tribunal of the paragraphs omitted. Such passages have been reproduced in small type. For .txt files a “[sm type begins]” note precedes the text and a “[sm type ends]” note follows the text to identify these passages. Passages within the small text which would normally be italics appear as gesperrt in non-txt formats and as text in .txt.
[The end of Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal Vol. 19, by Various.]