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Julius Streicher

The International Military Tribunal trials at Nuremberg [Nuernberg] in 1946 charged the defendants with four crimes. Count One charged all of the defendants with being "leaders, organizers, instigators, or accomplices in the formation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit, or which involved the commission of, Crimes against Peace, War Crimes, and Crimes against Humanity." Count Two charged the defendants with crimes against peace by their participation "in the planning, preparation, initiation, and waging of wars of aggression." Count Three charged the defendants with war crimes. Count Four charged the defendants with crimes against humanity. Streicher was indicted on counts one and four.

One of the earliest members of the Nazi Party, joining in 1921, he took part in the Munich Putsch. From 1925 to 1940 he was Gauleiter of Franconia. Elected to the Reichstag in 1933, he mas an honorary general in the SA. His persecution of the Jews was notorious. Dr. Streicher was one of the more influential Nazi leaders in Germany and at any given moment held at least two important official positions. At an early date in his checkered career, Streicher was convicted of a sexual crime, then of theft, bribery and embezzlement; later in life he was convicted of libel, slander and incitement to violence.

Streicher was a staunch Nazi and supporter of Hitler's main policies. There was no evidence to show that he was ever within Hitler's inner circle of advisers; nor during his career was he closely connected with the formulation of the policies which led to war. He mas never present, for example, at any of the important conferences when Hitler explained his decisions to his leaders. Although he was a Gauleiter, there is no evidence to prove that he had knowledge of those policies. In the opinion of the Nuremberg Tribunal, the evidence failed to establish his connection with the conspiracy or common plan to wage aggressive war.

Julius Streicher was the publisher of "Der Sturmer," an anti-Semitic weekly newspaper, from 1923 to 1945 and was its editor until 1933. Der Sturmer was the newspaper published in Nuremberg by Dr. Julius Streicher, the world's foremost anti-Semite. His paper, Der Sturmer, was certainly one of the most unique in all the world. A former schoolmaster, Streicher introduced a new technique in modern journalism when he learned to fuse his propensity for pornography and sadism with a berserk anti-Semitism. Each issue of "Der Sturmer," which reached a circulation of 600,000 in 1935, was filled with such articles, often lewd and disgusting. The material printed daily in Der Sturmer was of so violent and offensive a nature that the Nazi Government withdrew the paper from circulation before the opening of the German Winter Olympic Games in near-by Garmisch, for fear that its content would offend and antagonize visitors.

For his 25 years of speaking, writing, and preaching hatred of the Jews, Streicher was widely known as "Jew-Baiter Number One." In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with tlie virus of anti-Semitism, and incited the German people to active persecution. Streicher had charge of the Jewish boycott of April 1, 1933. He advocated the Nurnberg decrees of 1935. He was responsible for the demolition on August 10, 1938, of the synagogue in Nurnberg ; and on November 10, 1938, he spoke publicly in support of the Jewish pogrom which was taking place at that time.

But it was not only in Germany where he advocated his doctrines. As early as 1938 he began to call for the annihilation of the Jewish race. Twenty-three different articles of "Der Sturmer" between 1938 and 1941 mere produced in which extermination, "root and branch,",was preached. Typical of his teachings was a leading article in September 1938 which termed the Jew a germ and a pest, not a human being, but "a parasite, an enemy, an evil-doer, a disseminator of diseases who must be destroyed in the interest of mankind." Other articles urged that only when world Jewry had been annihilated would the Jewish problem have been solved, and predicted that 50 years hence the Jewish graves "will proclaim that this people of murderers and criminals has after all met its deserved fate." Streicher, in February 1940, published a letter from one of "Der Sturmer's" readers which compared Jews with swarms of locusts which must be exterminated completely. Such was the poison Streicher injected into the minds of thousands of Germans which caused them to follow the National Socialist policy of Jewish persecution and extermination.

A leading article of "Der Sturmer" in May 1939 showed clearly his aim: "A punitive expedition must come against the Jews in Russia. A punitive expedition which will provide the same fate for them that every murderer and criminal must expect. Death sentence and execution. The Jems in Russia must be killed. They must be exterminated root and branch." As the war in the early stages proved successful in acquiring more and more territory for the Reich, Streicher even intensified his efforts to incite the Germans against the Jews. There were at least 26 articles from "Der Sturmer," published between August 1941 and September 1944, 12 by Streicher's own hand, which demanded annihilation and extermination in unequivocal terms. Streicher wrote and published on December 25, 1941 : "If the danger of the reproduction of that curse of God in the Jewish blood is finally come to an end, then there is only one way - the extermination of that people whose father is the devil." And in February 1944 his own article stated : "Whoever does what a Jew does is a scoundrel, a criminal. And he who repeats and wishes to copy him deserves the same fate - annihilation, death."

With knowledge of the extermination of the Jews in the occupied eastern territory, Streicher continued to write and publish his propaganda of death. Testifying in the Nuermberg trial, Streicher vehemently denied any knowledge of mass executions of Jews. But the evidence made it clear that he continually received current information on the progress of the "final solution." His press photographer was sent to visit the ghettos of the east in the spring of 1943, the time of the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. The Jewish newspaper, "Israelitisches Wochenblatt," which Streicher received and read, carried in each issue accounts of Jewish atrocities in the east, and gave figures on the number of Jews who had been deported and killed. For example, issues appearing in the summer and fall of 1942 reported the death of 72,729 Jems in Warsaw, 17,542 in Lodz, 18,000 in Croatia, 125,000 in Rumania, 14,000 in Latvia, 85,000 in Yugoslavia, 700,000 in all of Poland. In November 1943 Streicher quoted verbatim an article from the "Israelitisches Wochenblatt" which stated that the Jews had virtually disappeared from Europe, and commented, "This is not a Jewish lie."

In December 1942, referring to an article in the "London Times" about the atrocities, aiming at extermination, Streicher said that Hitler had given warning that the second World War would lead to the destruction of Jewry. In January 1943 he wrote and published an article which said that Hitler's phophecy was being fulfilled, that world Jewry was being extirpated, and that it mas wonderful to know that Hitler was freeing the world of its Jewish tormentors.

In the face of the evidence before the Tribunal it was idle for Streicher to suggest that the solution of the Jewish problem which he favored was strictly limited to the classification of Jews as aliens, and the passing of discriminatory legislation such as the Nurnberg lams, supplemented if possible by international agreement on the creation of a Jewish state somewhere in the world, to which all Jews should emigrate. Streicher's incitement to murder and externiination at the time when Jews in the east were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constituted persecution on political and racial grounds in con- nection with war crimes, as defined by the Charter, and constitutes a crime against humanity.

The Tribunal founds that Streicher was not guilty on connt one, but that he was guilty on count four.