Reich Youth Leader and Governor of Vienna during World War II.
Background
Baldur von Schirach was born in Berlin on 9 March 1907, the son of an aristocratic German father and an American mother whose ancestors included two signatories of the Declaration of Independence. On his father's side descended from an officers’ family with artistic tendencies and a cosmopolitan background (Carl von Schirach had resigned from the army in 1908 to become a theatre director in Weimar), Baldur grew up in a pampered, well-to-do environment.
Education
Attended the University of Munich where he briefly studied Germanic folklore and art history.
Career
One of the earliest members of the NSDAP, von Schirach was soon a member of its innermost circle, in spite of his youth. Throwing himself body and soul into organizing high school and university students for the NSDAP, von Schirach proved himself an outstanding organizer and propagandist of National Socialism.
In 1929 von Schirach was put in charge of the National Socialist German Students’ League and two years later he was appointed Reich Youth Leader of the NSDAP, a post which he held until 1940.
In 1933 he organized the gigantic youth march in Potsdam, in which wave upon wave of youngsters greeted Hitler. Already before the Nazi seizure of power, von Schirach's ceaseless propaganda, his idealism and organizational flair for mobilizing youth, had succeeded in winning over hundreds of thousands of young Germans to Hitler's cause. In May 1933 he was made Leader of the Youth of the German Reich at the age of twenty-six and in the next few years his cult seemed second only to that of Hitler himself. Placed in control of the Hitler Youth, which by 1936 already comprised six million members, von Schirach used a powerful mixture of pagan romanticism, militarism and naive patriotism to build up recruits for Hitler’s war machine. Young Germans were to be drilled into acceptance of Nazi concepts of character, discipline, obedience and leadership asset out in von Schirach’s book , Die Hitler-Jugend (1934): they were to be moulded into a new race of‘supermen’. Von Schirach, who fancied himself as a writer and poet, published two books which were best-sellers in 1932.
Towards the outbreak of World War II, his position, however, was being undermined by the intrigues of Martin Bormann and other enemies. Jokes about his effeminate behaviour and his allegedly white bedroom furnished in a girlish manner, were legion and he was never quite able to live up to his own ideal type of the hard, tough, quick Hitler youth.
At the beginning of 1940, von Schirach enlisted as a volunteer in the German army, serving in France for a few months as an infantry officer and receiving the Iron Cross (Second Class).
Then, after being relieved of his post as Leader of the Hitler Youth, von Schirach was appointed Gauleiter and Governor of Vienna in August 1940. His unorthodox cultural policies in Austria soon aroused Hitler’s distrust (fed assiduously by Bormann) and, after a visit to the Berghof in 1943 where he pleaded for a moderate treatment of the eastern European peoples and criticized the conditions in which Jews were being deported, he lost all real influence. Nevertheless, he was on record (in a speech on 15 Septemer 1942) as saying that the ‘removal’ of Jews to the East would ‘contribute to European culture’.
The deportation of 185,000 Jews from Vienna to Poland during his tenure as Governor was a major item in the indictment against von Schirach at the Nuremberg trials. The war crimes tribunal conceded that he did not originate the policy, but had ‘participated in this deportation, though he knew that the best they [the Jews] could hope for was a miserable existence in the ghettoes of the East’. Von Schirach admitted that he had approved the resettlement' but denied all knowledge of genocide, denouncing Hitler from the dock as ‘a millionfold murderer' and calling Auschwitz ‘the most devilish mass murder in history’. Sentenced on 1 October 1946 to twenty years’ imprisonment for crimes against humanity - which he served out in the company of Rudolf Hessand Albert Speer - the handsome, fair-haired von Schirach appeared to undergo a change of heart, recognizing that he had misled German youth and contributed to poisoning a whole generation which had idolized him.
After his release on 30 September 1966, von Schirach lived a secluded life in South-West Germany. He died in his sleep at a small hotel in Kröv on 8 August 1974.
Views
A convinced anti-semite, after reading Henry Ford’s The International Jew and writings by Houston S. Chamberlain and Adolf Bartels, the aristocratic von Schirach was also a militant opponent of Christianity and of his own caste.
With his infectious enthusiasm and power to inspire youth with the ideals of comradeship, sacrifice, courage and honour, von Schirach was highly regarded by Hitler who also appreciated his blind devotion as expressed in hero-worshipping verses and such sycophantic sayings as ‘loyalty is everything and everything is the love of Adolf Hitler’.
Von Schirach taught German youth that their blood was better than that of any nation and devoted his lyricism to hollow worship of the Fuhrer's genius.