Baldur Von Schirach Interview - October 13, 1966

Baldur Von Schirach Interview - October 13, 1966. | LucciNation.

Interviewed upon his release from Spandau Prison in October 13, 1966 by NBC News' Garrick Utley.

Transcript
GARRICK UTLEY:
Baldur Von Schirach, former leader of the Hitler youth, former Gauleiter of Vienna, former top Nazi, now lives in this comforterable sprawling villa in the south of Germany. He has lived here only slightly more than a week, ever since he was released from Berlin’s Spandau Prison, where he served 20 years for complicity in the murder of 50 thousand Austrian Jews. In his days of power, Baldur Von Schirach was a symbol of arrogant Nazism. He was a member of Hitler’s cabinet at the age of 32, and close associate of the furor. Now he is 59, blind in one eye, and suffers from thrombosis. His wife divorced him when he was in prison. He has returned to a Germany he has never known and has read about only in newspapers. As much as anyone else and more than most Nazis, this man was responsible for the rise of the third Reich, and what happened during it.

UTLEY: How do you explain the fascination Germans had for Hitler and his movement, why were the people, speaking German… the German people, cling to Hitler and follow him, what was it that fascinated the German people, was it a nationalistic trait or a character here in this country, which explains this fact.

SCHIRACH: Well there is a certain… Mr. Utley you know the Germans very well. And therefore you are well equated with the answer that you are now going to receive. There is a certain emotionalism in the trait of our character. But other nations have that too; it is not possible for me in this short little conversation to give you any answer in detail. I would like to give it; I have to write pages to give you the right answer.

UTLEY: But there is a certain something here, some characteristic, which perhaps even, continues today although below the surface, in Germany.

SCHIRACH: There is some answer, we are not English, we are not American, we are not French, we are German. But our German people, you know them very well, they are good by heart, they are industrious, they are brave, they are very lovable people really. But they are easily misled.

UTLEY: Did you personally know about the concentration camps as policy of Hitler’s? Did you even have any part in the carrying out of this?

SCHIRACH: In the Nuremburg trial I gave a picture of a concentration camp I, visited one, and what I saw, did not show any of the atrocities that later on were disclosed, atrocities that had really happened.

UTLEY: You mean to say that at that time you did not know of the atrocities, which were being carried out?

SCHIRACH: At that time not, I cannot give you now an exact date that I learned of such atrocities. When I learned about them I did what I could. But, and that is my moral guilt before history, I did not do enough.