Baldur von Schirach

Description

Baldur Benedikt von Schirach (May 9, 1907 &ndash; August 8, 1974) was a Nazi youth leader later convicted of being a war criminal. Schirach was the head of the Hitler-Jugend (HJ, Hitler Youth) and Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter ("Reich Governor") of Vienna. <p>Schirach was born in Weimar, the final of four children of theatre director Rittmeister Carl Benno von Schirach (1873 - 1948) and his American wife Emma Middleton Lynah Tillou (1872 - 1944). Through his mother, Schirach claimed descent from two signatories of the United States Declaration of Independence. English was in fact the first language which he learned at home and he was not able to speak German until the age of five. He had two sisters, Viktoria and Rosalind von Schirach, and a brother Karl Benedict von Schirach who committed suicide in 1919 aged 19. <p>On March 31, 1932 von Schirach married 19-year-old Henriette Hoffmann (called Henny). She was the daughter of Heinrich Hoffmann from Munich who was the personal...