Raeder testified that he was an apolitical professional who was just doing his duty, and to the extent he thought about politics, he disliked the Nazi regime. Raeder testified that he was deeply horrified by the nature of the Nazi regime when he saw how badly Gessler had been tortured in March 1945, stated he had stopped wearing his Golden Party Badge to protest the Nazi regime after he had seen what had been done to Gessler, and he had frequently made "serious protests" against the Nazi regime during private meetings with Hitler, so it was unfair to blame him for the crimes of the Third Reich.Bird Erich Raeder p. 217. This in turn led him to be questioned by Maxwell Fyfe about his speech on Heroes' Day on 12 March 1939 praising Hitler "... for the clear and unmerciful declaration of war against Bolshevism and International Jewry, whose drive for destruction of peoples we have felt quite enough in our racial body". Raeder testified in response to Maxwell Fyfe's question about his Heroes' Day speech to his belief that starting in 1917 "International Jewry had destroyed the resistance of the German people ... and had gained an excessively large and oppressive influence in German affairs" and all of the anti-Semitic measures of the Nazi regime which presumably included genocide were merely just acts of German self-defence. Goda wrote that Raeder by his own testimony disproved his own claims to have been an apolitical professional who was against the Nazi regime, and instead established that he was an anti-Semite who willingly served the Nazi regime because of his hatred for Jews. Taylor commented about Raeder's claim to have been just an apolitical professional doing his job was meaningless because: "It is an innocent and respectable business to be a locksmith, but it is nonetheless a crime if the locksmith turns his talents into picking the locks of his neighbours and looting their homes." Raeder's claims to have been an apolitical officer who objected to the Nazis involved him in many testy exchanges with Maxwell Fyfe. Maxwell Fyfe charged that Raeder had been part of the effort to cover up that it was an U-boat that sank the Athenia and to falsely accuse the British of sinking the Athenia. Raeder claimed that he had been "very indignant" about his government's claim that Britain had sunk the Athenia, which led Maxwell Fyfe to remark that he had done nothing to express that "indignation", just as he claimed to have been angry about the false charges of homosexuality against Werner von Fritsch, where he had also done nothing after Fritsch had been cleared.
