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Julius Streicher
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Julius Streicher (12 February 1885 – 16 October 1946) was a prominent Nazi prior to World War II. He was the founder and publisher of Der Stürmer newspaper, which became a central element of the Nazi propaganda machine. His publishing firm also released three anti-Semitic books for children, including the 1938 Der Giftpilz (The Poison Mushroom), one of the most widespread pieces of propaganda, which purported to warn about insidious dangers Jews posed by using the metaphor of an attractive yet deadly mushroom.
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Julius Streicher (12 February 1885 – 16 October 1946) was a prominent Nazi prior to World War II. He was the founder and publisher of Der Stürmer newspaper, which became a central element of the Nazi propaganda machine. His publishing firm also released three anti-Semitic books for children, including the 1938 Der Giftpilz (The Poison Mushroom), one of the most widespread pieces of propaganda, which purported to warn about insidious dangers Jews posed by using the metaphor of an attractive yet deadly mushroom. After the war, he was convicted of crimes against humanity and executed.
Early life
Streicher was born in Fleinhausen, Kingdom of Bavaria, one of nine children of the teacher Friedrich Streicher and his wife Anna (née Weiss). He worked as an elementary school teacher like his father, and in 1909 he began his political career, joining the German Democratic Party. He would later claim that because his political work brought him into contact with German Jews, he “must therefore have been fated to become later on a writer and speaker on racial politics.” In 1913 Streicher married Kunigunde Roth, a baker's daughter, in Nürnberg. They had two sons, Lothar (born 1915) and Elmar (born 1918).
Streicher joined the German Army in 1914. He won the Iron Cross and reached the rank of lieutenant by the time the Armistice was signed in 1918.
Early politics
In 1919 Streicher became active in the anti-Semitic Schutz- und Trutz-Bund (Society for Protective and Offensive Action), one of the various reactionary organizations that sprang up in the wake of the failed German Communist revolution of 1918. Such groups fostered the view that Jews had conspired with “Bolshevik” traitors in trying to subject Germany to Communist rule. In 1920 he turned to the Deutschsozialistische Partei (German Socialist Party), a group whose platform was close to that of the young NSDAP, or Nazi Party. Streicher sought to move the German Socialists in a more virulently anti-Semitic direction – an effort which aroused enough opposition that he left the group and brought his now-substantial following to yet another organization in 1921, the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft (German Working Community), which hoped to unite the various anti-Semitic Völkisch movements.
National Socialism
In 1921, Streicher finally found his mentor. He visited Munich in order to hear Adolf Hitler speak, an experience that he later said left him transformed: “I had never seen the man before. And there I sat, an unknown among unknowns. I saw this man shortly before midnight, after he had spoken for three hours, drenched in perspiration, radiant. My neighbour said he thought he saw a halo around his head, and I experienced something which transcended the commonplace.” Soon after, Streicher joined the Nazi party and merged his personal following with Hitler’s, almost doubling the party membership.
In May 1923 Streicher founded the newspaper, Der Stürmer (The Stormer, or, more freely, The Attacker). From the outset, the chief aim of the paper was to promulgate anti-Semitic propaganda. “We will be slaves of the Jew,” the paper announced. “Therefore he must go.”
In November of that year, Streicher participated in Hitler’s first effort to seize power, the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. Streicher marched with Hitler in the front row of the would-be revolutionaries and braved the bullets of the Munich police. His loyalty earned him Hitler’s lifelong trust and protection; in the years that followed, Streicher would be one of the dictator’s few true intimates.
As a reward for his dedication, when the Nazi party was legalized again and re-organized in 1925 Streicher was appointed gauleiter of the Bavarian region of Franconia (which included his home town of Nuremberg). In the early years of the party’s rise, gauleiters were essentially party functionaries without real power; but in the final years of the Weimar Republic, they became paramilitary commanders. During the 12 years of the Nazi regime itself, party gauleiters like Streicher would wield immense power, and be in large measure untouchable by legal authority.
Streicher was also elected to the Bavarian "Landtag" or legislature, a position which gave him a margin of parliamentary immunity from prosecution – a safety net that would help him resist efforts to silence his racist message.
The rise of Der Stürmer
Beginning in 1924, Streicher used Der Stürmer as a mouthpiece not only for general anti-semitic attacks, but for calculated smear campaigns against specific Jews, such as the Nuremberg city official Julius Fleischmann, who worked for Streicher’s nemesis, mayor Hermann Luppe. Der Stürmer accused Fleischmann of stealing socks from his quartermaster during combat in World War I. Fleischmann sued Streicher and successfully disproved the allegations in court (Streicher was fined 900 marks), but the detailed testimony exposed other less-than-glorious details of Fleischmann’s record, and his reputation was badly damaged anyway. It was proof that Streicher’s unofficial motto for his tactics was grimly correct: "Something always sticks."
The slanderous attacks continued, and lawsuits followed. Like Fleischmann, other outraged German Jews defeated Streicher in the well of the court. But his goal was not necessarily legal victory; to committed Nazis like Streicher, courtroom losses were a defiant badge of honor, and what Streicher wanted was the widest possible dissemination of his message, which press coverage often provided. The rules of the court provided Streicher with an arena to humiliate his opponents. The Weimar habit of following the strictest letter of the law made prosecution for more serious crimes difficult. Even Der Stürmer's infamous official slogan, Die Juden sind unser Unglück (the Jews are our misfortune) was deemed unactionable under German statutes, since it was not a direct incitement to violence.
Streicher’s opponents complained to authorities that Der Stürmer violated a statute against religious offense with his constant promulgation of the “blood libel” – the medieval accusation that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood to make matzoh. Streicher argued that his accusations were based on race, not religion, and that his diatribes were political speech, and therefore protected by the German constitution.
Streicher orchestrated his early campaigns against Jews to make the most extreme possible claims – short of violating a law that might get the paper shut down. He insisted in the pages of his newspaper that the Jews had caused the worldwide Depression, and were responsible for the crippling unemployment and inflation which afflicted Germany during the 1920s. He claimed that Jews were white-slavers and were responsible for over 90 percent of the prostitutes in the country. Real unsolved killings in Germany, especially of children or women, were often confidently explained in the pages of Der Stürmer as cases of “Jewish ritual murder.”
One of Streicher’s constant themes was the sexual violation of ethnically German women by Jews, a subject which served as an excuse to publish semi-pornographic tracts and images detailing degrading sexual acts. These “essays” proved an especially appealing feature of the paper for young men. With the help of his notorious cartoonist, “Fips” (Philipp Rupprecht), Streicher published image after image of gruesome Jewish stereotypes and sexually-charged encounters. His portrayal of Jews as subhuman and evil is widely considered to have played a critical role in the dehumanization and marginalization of the Jewish minority in the eyes of common Germans – creating the necessary conditions for the later perpetration of the Holocaust.
Streicher also combed the pages of the Talmud and the Old Testament in search of passages which could paint their ancient Jewish authors as harsh or cruel – a practice which continues to this day among hard-line anti-Semites. In 1929, this close study of Jewish scripture helped convict Streicher in a case known as “The Great Nuremberg Ritual Murder Trial.” His familiarity with Jewish text was proof to the court that his attacks were religious in nature; Streicher was found guilty and imprisoned for two months. In Germany, press reaction to the trial was highly critical of Streicher; but the gauleiter was greeted after his conviction by hundreds of cheering supporters, and within months Nazi party membership surged to its highest levels yet.
Streicher in power
In April 1933, after Nazi control of the German state apparatus gave Gauleiters enormous power, Streicher organized a one-day boycott of Jewish businesses which was used as a dress-rehearsal for other anti-Semitic commercial measures. As he consolidated his hold on power, he came to more or less rule the city of Nuremberg and his Gau Franconia. Among his nicknames were the "King of Nuremberg" and the "Beast of Franconia."
To protect himself from accountability, Streicher relied on Hitler’s protection. Hitler declared that Der Stürmer was his favorite newspaper, and saw to it that each weekly issue was posted for public reading in special glassed-in display cases known as "Stürmerkasten". The newspaper reached a peak circulation of 480,000 in 1935.
Streicher later claimed that he was only “indirectly responsible” for passage of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and that he felt slighted because he was not directly consulted.
In 1938, Streicher ordered the Great Synagogue of Nuremberg destroyed; he later claimed that his decision was based on his disapproval of its architectural design.
Fall from power
Streicher’s excesses brought condemnation even from other Nazis. Streicher’s behavior was viewed as so irresponsible that he alienated much of the party leadership; chief among his enemies in Hitler’s hierarchy was Reichs Marshall Hermann Göring, who loathed him and later claimed that he forbade his own staff to read Der Stürmer.
In spite of his special relationship with Hitler, after 1938 Streicher’s position began to unravel. He was accused of keeping Jewish property seized after Kristallnacht in November 1938; he was charged with spreading untrue stories about Göring - such as alleging that his daughter Edda was conceived by artificial insemination, and he was confronted with his excessive personal behavior, including unconcealed adultery and several furious verbal attacks on other gauleiters. In February 1940 he was stripped of his party offices and withdrew from the public eye, although he was permitted to continue publishing Der Stürmer. Streicher also remained on good terms with Hitler.
Streicher's wife, Kunigunde Streicher, died in 1943 after 30 years of marriage.
When Germany surrendered to the Allied armies in May 1945, Streicher said later, he decided to commit suicide. Instead, he married his former secretary, Adele Tappe. Days later, on May 23, 1945, Streicher was captured in the town of Waidring, Austria, by a group of American officers led by Major Henry Plitt – who was Jewish. At first Streicher claimed to be a painter named “Joseph Sailer,” but after a few questions, quickly admitted to his true identity.
Trial and execution
Julius Streicher was not a member of the military and did not take part in planning the Holocaust, or the invasion of other nations. Yet his pivotal role in inciting the extermination of Jews was significant enough, in the prosecutors' judgment, to include him in the indictment of Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal – which sat, ironically, in Nuremberg, where Streicher had once been an unchallenged authority.
During the trial, Gustave Gilbert, an American Army psychologist, was allowed to examine the Nazi leaders who were tried at Nuremberg for war crimes. Among other tests, a German version of the Wechsler-Bellevue IQ test was administered. Julius Streicher scored 106, the lowest among the Nazi leaders tested.
During his trial, Streicher displayed for the last time the flair for courtroom theatrics that had made him famous in the 1920s. He answered questions from his own defense attorney with diatribes against Jews, the Allies, and the court itself, and was frequently silenced by the court officers. Streicher was largely shunned by all of the other Nuremberg defendants, who thought him a vulgar, despicable man (Göring's hostility toward him was well-established). He also peppered his testimony with references to passages of Jewish texts he had so often carefully selected and inserted (invariably out of context) into the pages of Der Stürmer.
Streicher was found guilty of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial and sentenced to death on October 1, 1946. The judgment against him read, in part:
Streicher was hanged in the early hours of October 16, 1946, along with the nine other condemned defendants from the first Nuremberg trial (Göring, Streicher's nemesis, committed suicide only hours earlier). Streicher's was the most melodramatic of the hangings carried out that night. At the bottom of the scaffold he cried out "Heil Hitler!" When he mounted the platform, he delivered his last sneering reference to Jewish scripture, snapping "Purim-Fest 1946!" The Jewish holiday Purim celebrates the escape by the Jews from extermination at the hands of Haman, an ancient Persian government official. At the end of the Purim story, Haman is hanged. Streicher's final declaration before the hood went over his head was, "The Bolsheviks will hang you one day!"
The consensus among eyewitnesses was that the hanging of Julius Streicher did not proceed as planned, and that he did not receive the quick death from spinal severing typical of the other executions at Nuremberg. Howard K. Smith, who covered the executions for the International News Service, reported that Streicher "went down kicking" which may have dislodged the hangman's knot from its ideal position. Smith stated that Streicher could be heard groaning under the scaffold after he dropped through the trap-door, and that the executioner intervened under the gallows, which was screened by wood panels and a black curtain, to finish the job. U. S. Army Master Sergeant John C. Woods was the main executioner, and not only insisted he had performed all executions correctly, but stated he was very proud of his work. Critics have said that the length of the ropes was too short for the circumstances as recommended by standard gallows technique, increasing the chances of the prisoners strangling rather than expiring instantly, and that the trap doors were too small, causing many of the condemned to sustain facial lacerations and bruises while falling through the trap.
External links
- short biography (German)
- from Der Stürmer
- ("The Poison Mushroom")
- Article on Streicher's controversial execution
- Transcript of the testimony of Julius Streicher
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