Baldur von Schirach
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Image:Bs3.jpg Baldur Benedikt von Schirach (May 9, 1907 – August 8, 1974) was a Nazi youth leader later convicted of being a war criminal. Schirach was the head of the Hitler-Jugend (HJ, Hitler Youth) and Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter ("Imperial Governor") of Vienna.
Biography
Schirach was born in Weimar, the son of theatre director Rittmeister Karl von Schirach and his American wife Emma. Through his mother, Schirach claimed descent from two signers of the American Declaration of Independence.
Schirach joined a Wehrjugendgruppe (military cadet group) at the age of ten and became a member of the NSDAP in 1925. He was soon transferred to Munich and in 1929 became leader of the Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Studentenbunds (NSDStB, National Socialist Students' Union). In 1931 he was a Reichsjugendführer (youth leader) in the NSDAP and in 1933 he was made head of the Hitler Youth (Hitler Jugend) and given a SA rank of Gruppenführer. He was made a state secretary in 1936.
In 1940 he organized the evacuation of 5 million children from cities threatened by Allied bombing. Later that year, he joined the army and volunteered for service in France, where he was awarded the Iron Cross before being recalled. Schirach lost control of the Hitler Youth to Artur Axmann, and was appointed Governor ("Gauleiter" or "Reichsstatthalter") of the Reichsgau Vienna, a post in which he remained until the end of the war. Over the next few years Schirach was responsible for moving Jews from Vienna to concentration camps in Poland. During his tenure 185,000 Jews were deported from Vienna to Poland, and in a speech on 15 September 1942 he mentioned their deportation as a "contribution to European culture." Later during the war von Schirach pleaded for a moderate treatment of the eastern European peoples and criticized the conditions in which Jews were being deported. He fell into disfavor in 1943, but remained at his post.[1]
Schirach surrendered in 1945 and was one of the officials put on trial at Nuremberg. At the trial Schirach was one of only two men to denounce Hitler (the other was Albert Speer). He said that he did not know about the extermination camps. He also provided evidence that he had protested to Martin Bormann about the inhumane treatment of the Jews. He was found guilty on October 1, 1946, of conspiring to commit "crimes against peace" and of "crimes against humanity". He was sentenced and served twenty years as prisoner of war in Spandau Prison.
He was repatriated on September 30, 1966, and retired quietly to southern Germany. He published his memoirs, Ich glaubte an Hitler ("I believed in Hitler"), in 1974 and died in Kröv-an-der-Mosel.
He had married Henriette Hoffman in 1932, and they had three sons and a daughter. She divorced him in 1950 while he was in prison.
External links
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