Der Hitler-Junge

A biography of the organizer and leader of the Hitler Youth and, from 1940 to the end of the war, Nazi Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter of Vienna. Schirach was an antisemite, but he apparently took no active part in the Holocaust or other Nazi atrocities. At the Nuremberg Trials, and later in conversation with the author, he claimed not to have known about them. The Nuremberg tribunal could find no evidence of his complicity in the Holocaust. The Hitler Youth received instruction in racist doctrine and antisemitism, but Schirach prevented the distribution in the organization of "Der Stürmer", and when he heard of the plans for "Kristallnacht" he ordered the Hitler Youth not to take part. He approved the deportation of Viennese Jews and defended it in a virulently antisemitic speech in September 1942, but later asserted that he thought the Jews were merely to be resettled. However, it is known that in 1942-43 he heard of the mass killing of Jews. He explained that he did not dare to protest.