Posted by Stephan Hansen

In this post I will show relatively unknown facts from the past of Baldur von Schirach.

In 1931 Baldur von Schirach was a youth leader in the National Socialist German Workers Party. In 1933 he was made head of the Hitler Youth and held the title Reichsjugendfuehrer (National Youth Leader) until 1940. In 1940 Schirach left his post in the Hitler Youth which was then taken over by Arthur Axmann and Hitler made Schirach Reichsstatthalter of the Gau Vienna. He remained in that post until the end of the war.

Baldur Benedikt von Schirach was born on May 9, 1907 in Weimar, the son of theater director Rittmeister Karl von Schirach (1873-1948) and his American wife Emma Tillou(1872-1944). He married Henriette Hoffmann, the daughter of Hitler's famous photographer Heinrich Hoffmann in 1932. They had three sons and a daughter. She divorced him in 1949 while he was in prison.

On his mother's side, Schirach was descended from two signers of the American Declaration of Independence.

His grandfather Friedrich Karl von Schirach also emigrated to America shortly before the Civil War and had an honorable career in the Union Army. He rose to the rank of Brevet Major and later returned to his native Germany. He died within 10 days of the United States entering World War One in 1917.

Baldur von Schirach surrendered in 1945 and was one of the officials put on trial at Nuremberg. He was sentenced because of his post as Reichsstatthalter of the Gau Vienna and not because his post as National Youth Leader. He served twenty years as a prisoner in Spandau Prison and he was repatriated on September 30, 1966.

Edited for spelling by BDM Historian.