Crimes of Baldur Von Schirach - Nazi War Criminal & Hitler Youth Leader - Nuremberg Trials.
Baldur Benedikt von Schirach was a member of the noble Schirach family. Baldur von Schirach was 7 years old when the First World War began on the 28th of July 1914. Baldur’s brother Karl who was 7 years his senior, shot himself in 1919 out of grief over the Kaiser's abdication and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.
On the 9th of May 1925, the day of his 18th birthday, Baldur von Schirach joined the Nazi Party. In 1929, he was selected as a national speaker and was active in Party propaganda activities. 2 years later he was named National Youth Leader of the Nazi Party.
On the 31st of March 1932 Baldur von Schirach married the 19-year-old Henriette Hoffmann and they became part of Hitler's inner circle. The young couple would become welcome guests at "Berghof" which was Adolf Hitler's mountain residence on the Obersalzberg in the mountains of Bavaria.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into power in January 1933. On the 17th of June of the same year, von Schirach was named the Youth Leader of the German Reich with responsibility for all youth organizations in the nation.
Schirach would appear frequently at rallies together with Hitler in rousing the Hitler Youth audience. The largest gathering usually took place annually at Nuremberg, where Hitler Youth members from all over Germany would converge for the annual Nazi Party rally.
Since the Hitler Youth and its female section the League of German Girls were considered fully Aryan organizations by Nazi officials, premarital sex was encouraged in their ranks.
At the 1936 Nuremberg Rally, where there were some 100,000 participants of youth organizations present, 900 girls between fifteen and eighteen years of age returned home pregnant.
Both organizations – the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls - were led by Baldur von Schirach and became the primary tools that the Nazis used to indoctrinate young people with Nazi ideology, thus shaping the beliefs, thinking and actions of the German youth. Boys and girls were taught to be both racially conscious and physically fit in order to build a new future for Germany and were often present at Nazi Party rallies and marches.
By the outbreak of war in 1939, the Hitler Youth had already prepared a generation of young people to fight the war and occupy foreign territory.
World War 2 started on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. By 1940, the Hitler Youth had eight million members.
Schirach voluntarily joined the Wehrmacht – the German Army.
On the 8th of August 1940 Baldur von Shirach became Reich Governor and Nazi party Gauleiter in Vienna, Austria.
In Vienna Schirach moved with his family to Hofburg, the former principal imperial palace of the Habsburg dynasty. In the position of Vienna’s district leader, which he retained until the end of the war in 1945, Schirach was responsible for the deportation of the Viennese Jews, which he described in a speech on the 14th of September 1942: "If you wanted to reproach me that I am deporting tens of thousands of Jews from this city to the eastern ghetto, I have to answer: I see it as an active contribution to European culture.”
During Schirach’s tenure, 65,000 Jews were deported to concentration camps.
On the 2nd of April 1945 Vienna came under attack by the Red Army which by the 9th of April was approaching the city centre. On that day, Schirach broadcast a final call for citizens to fight "to the last man". However, Baldur himself did not fight but instead departed his headquarters and then fled westward with the 6th Panzer Army towards the Tyrol where, on May 2, he discarded his uniform and went underground under the assumed name of Richard Falk in the Austrian town of Schwaz. On the 5th of June, von Schirach surrendered to the American town commandant and was arrested.
Baldur von Schirach was then tried at the Nuremberg Trials.
He was sentenced to 20 years in Spandau Prison, Berlin.
Henriette von Schirach divorced her husband while he was in prison - on the 20th of July 1949.
Baldur von Schirach was released from prison on the 30th of September 1966, after serving his full sentence. He was 67 years old when he died on the 8th of August 1974.


There were no tears shed for Baldur von Schirach.
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