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Volume VI · Page 432
| the Reich presidential election,
I officially joined the Center Party in Gleiwitz, where I was working and
living at the time. Q. Dr. Burkart, you have mentioned the 1932 elections as being the Hitler-Hindenburg election. To be more accurate, it was an alternative — Hindenburg or Hitler election. They were competitors? A. Yes. That is correct. In 1933 1 did not join the Nazi Party. First, because of my political past, second, above all because the new big shots who had taken the wheel in Silesia and Upper-Silesia were by no means attractive people. I am now thinking of Gauleiter Brueckner, and Police President Heiders in Breslau, and Police President Remshorn in Gleiwitz. I was strengthened in this view by the events of 30 June 1934 when people such as Schleicher and a certain ministerial director in the Ministry of Transportation were shot. The latter was the head of the Catholic Party in Berlin. In 1937 my friend Moeller asked me whether I wouldn't like to join the [Nazi] Party after all. I laughed at him and told him that it was like trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole. I must add that in 1933 when the parties were dissolved, my friends and the people who shared my view in Upper-Silesia, and myself, considered what we would do. At that time we agreed that we would join the Stahlhelm because we thought that that was a movement on a bourgeois basis and of a bourgeois character, an organization which represented a certain counterbalance to national socialism. This idea was a mistake. In the years 1934 to 1935, the Stahlhelm in Silesia was transferred to the SA in body, so that suddenly I landed there where I had not the slightest intention of going. A good friend of mine was one of the leaders of the Stahlhelm in Gleiwitz and he also worked in my department. Partly on this account and partly because of the regrouping and the incorporation of the Stahlhelm in the SA, he had for the same reasons suddenly become an SA man. Through him, I was able to get out of doing any actual duty, nor did I have to take any oath. In 1935 to 1936, 1 succeeded in leaving the SA officially, so that I no longer had any formal ties with any organization of the Third Reich. After the collapse in the summer of 1945 in Saxony, Where I was working at that time, I joined the CDU (Christian Democratic Union). In other words, the party with which I had started as a young man. |
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