Ferdinand von Schirach: Terror

DefendantThat is correct.

Presiding JudgeWhat were your interests outside of school?

DefendantPhysics. Every year I used to enter ‘Young Scientist of the Year’.

Presiding JudgeAnd one time you even won second prize.

DefendantYes. Apart from that I did a lot of sport, especially football and athletics.

Presiding JudgeWould it be fair to say that school and learning came easily to you?

DefendantYes.

Presiding JudgeYour childhood and youth were untroubled?

DefendantI would say they were happy. Yes.

Presiding JudgeLet us come to your choice of profession. Was it actually your own wish to become a soldier? Or was it your father’s?

DefendantIt’s true that my father did also want to be a fighter pilot.

Presiding JudgeAnd?

DefendantHe didn’t make it.

Presiding JudgeI see.

DefendantI always wanted to join the Air Force. When I was a child I wanted to be a fighter pilot. It was all I was interested in. I used to have posters of aeroplanes on my bedroom wall.

Presiding JudgeWhat made you interested in them?

DefendantI found it fascinating. The dream of flying, the speed, the precision of the planes.

Presiding JudgeAs soon as you left school, when you were eighteen, you applied for a position as an officer trainee…

DefendantI was invited to attend the Officer Candidate Assessment Centre in Cologne and took an aptitude test. That lasted two days. Afterwards I was examined to check that I was medically and psychologically fit and had the psychomotor skills necessary for the service. In October I entered the service at Fürstenfeldbruck.

Presiding JudgeWhat did that consist of?

DefendantIn the first year I completed officer training and was commissioned with the rank of Ensign. Then over the next two years I went through basic and advanced training as a pilot.

Presiding JudgeWhere did you do that?

DefendantIn the United States, to be precise in Goodyear, Arizona. Then I trained as a jet pilot at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas. Fifteen months.

Presiding JudgeWhat does one learn there?

DefendantEssentially: flying.

There is theoretical and simulator-based training for about three hundred flying hours. Once that section of the training is completed, you are licensed to fly military aircraft.

Presiding JudgeAnd then?

DefendantThen I had to familiarise myself with flying conditions in Germany.

Presiding JudgeAre they so very different?

DefendantThe topography and weather conditions are different. And it’s much more complicated moving around within European airspace – if you think of how many borders there are and the number of flights here.

Presiding JudgeI see. Did you sign up for sixteen years as a regular soldier right at the start?

DefendantThe term of duty is not fixed straight away. One signs up in stages according to one’s level of training.

Presiding JudgeI have your Air Force personnel file here. You have consistently received the best appraisals and on each occasion you were, and I quote: ‘unreservedly recommended for promotion’.

DefendantWhat you need to bear in mind is: the proportion of people that apply to join the Air Force who end up in the cockpit of a fighter jet is one in ten thousand. Even out of the trained pilots only one in ten is ever going to fly the Eurofighter.

Presiding JudgeSo it’s a rigorous selection process.

DefendantIn this country there are more chairmen of public companies and more heart surgeons than there are fighter pilots.

Presiding JudgeLet us come to the events of 26th May. Did you follow the statement made here in the court by the witness Lt Col Lauterbach?

DefendantYes.

Presiding JudgeAnd in your view, did the witness represent the sequence of events accurately?

DefendantYes.

Presiding JudgeThey match your recollections?

DefendantCompletely.

Presiding JudgeGood. Would you describe for us the minutes before the Lufthansa aeroplane was shot down once again please, from your own personal point of view.

DefendantThe diversion and the warning shots produced no reaction from the captain of the Lufthansa aircraft, as you have heard. A couple of minutes later we received the order from the DC not to shoot.

Presiding JudgeFrom the witness, Lt Col Lauterbach?

DefendantYes, that’s right. So there was nothing else we could do other than fly alongside the plane. We repeatedly attempted to make contact. By radio and visually. But without success.

Presiding JudgeThe witness Lt Col Lauterbach told us that you had questioned the order not to shoot.

DefendantThat is correct. I checked twice with the command centre to see whether the order to shoot had not been given after all. I knew that the Lufthansa aircraft was only a few minutes away from the stadium.

Presiding JudgeWhat did you think in that moment?

DefendantThat’s hard to explain.

Presiding JudgeWe have time. Please, try.

DefendantYou have to understand that our entire training, the complicated selection procedures, the courses, the years of physical conditioning, the appraisals by our superiors and so forth, all of that has just one objective: in the most difficult and testing circumstances we have to hold our nerve. Our job is to assess danger quickly and precisely. That is what we’re trained to do.

Presiding JudgeI see.

DefendantAnd while we were flying alongside the Lufthansa aircraft, the worst situation which we can encounter in peacetime occurred. I know every one of us has thought about it hundreds of times. We’ve discussed amongst ourselves, with our families, our friends, our superiors, our law lecturers. Of course, every pilot hopes he’s never going to find himself in this situation.

Presiding JudgeIt’s not a combat mission.

DefendantThat’s just it. The people on board that Lufthansa plane are civilians, we’re supposed to be protecting them.

Presiding JudgeBut what did you think?

DefendantI considered whether I was disobeying an order. To save tens of thousands of people by killing hundreds of them. If you’re asking me what was actually going through my mind in that second…

Presiding JudgeYes?

Defendant( more quietly ) I thought about my wife and my son. Innards.

Presiding JudgeInnards?

DefendantThat’s my word for it.

Presiding JudgeAha.

DefendantI thought about death. That everything in my life was now going to change…

That’s what I thought.

Presiding JudgeVery well. What did you do?

DefendantI slipped back behind the Lufthansa plane. So we were now flying a little behind the civilian aircraft, slightly above it. Then I let go of the Sidewinder. I can’t remember shouting into the microphone. I only heard that afterwards. My lawyer played me the tape.