. NMT04-T0224
Volume IV · Page 224
| A. My parents were both practicing
protestants. Q. Where did you spend your childhood and adolescence? A. Up to the last school year, I lived in my home town and worked on the farm in my leisure hours. Q. You emphasize the fact that you worked on your father's farm. Does that have any special significance in your development? A. Unconsciously, I got to know the conditions and ways of handling a farm and got to know the human conditions in a farm district, that is, the cooperation and living together of farmers, industrial workers, peasants, merchants, tradesmen, and people of other trades. The rest of the time my professional development proceeded along with my political development. These conditions of administration, culture, religion, and education, as I got to know them in that village, always remained with me, and they became the leading motives for my own philosophy. Q. What kind of education did you have? A. After a few years of public school and high school, I graduated from the Gymnasium. Q. Where and what did you study? A. I studied in Leipzig, in Goettingen, and my fields were law and economics. Later, after my graduation, I spent one year in Italy studying the Fascist system and the Fascist philosophy of international law. Q. Are you married? A. Yes. Q. Since when? A. Since 1934. Q. Do you have any children? A. Yes. I have 5 children from 2 to 11 years of age. Q. When did you become a member of the Nazi Party? A. In 1925. Q. How did you come to enter the Nazi Party? A. I have been interested in politics from my earliest days on. When I was 16 years old, I was director of a youth group of the German National People's Party; but I was not sufficiently bourgeois and involved in the class system not to turn my back very quickly on this bourgeois party, since its special interests and political methods could not appeal to me. However, on the other hand, I was too closely connected with the moral, religious, and social philosophy of the traditional bourgeoisie to become a Marxist for instance. But at that time I recognized that the social demands were a truly national problem, a problem, that is to say, concerning the whole people, and I recognized that the national demands were also a truly social problem. These two points of view seemed likely to find the best solution in National Socialism |
