NUREMBERG, Germany — The body of Julius Streicher, the Nazi Party’s most virulent anti-Semitic propagandist and publisher of the hate-filled newspaper Der Stürmer, swung lifelessly beneath the gallows for a full fifteen minutes before the attending physicians confirmed his death, marking the end of a life defined by sexual deviance, corruption, and an unrelenting, fanatical hatred that helped pave the road to the Holocaust.
The execution, carried out in the early hours of October 16, 1946, inside the gymnasium of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, was botched by the hangman, Sergeant John C. Woods, whose deliberately insufficient drop length caused the condemned man to strangle slowly rather than die instantly from a broken neck. Witnesses reported that the 61-year-old former Gauleiter of Franconia, who had shouted “Heil Hitler!”
from the scaffold just moments before the trapdoor opened, could be heard groaning in agony from the pit below as he convulsed for what seemed like an eternity before succumbing to asphyxiation.
Streicher, the ninth child of a primary school teacher born in Fleinhausen in 1885, was the only one of the twelve Nazi leaders sentenced to death who was convicted solely on the basis of his words and writings, rather than direct participation in military operations or the administrative machinery of mass murder. The International Military Tribunal found him guilty of crimes against humanity, determining that his quarter-century of incitement to persecution and extermination constituted a crime against humanity, as his propaganda had deliberately infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism that made the genocide of six million Jews possible.
The execution of Streicher, who was widely known as “Jew-Baiter Number One,” came after a trial in which he displayed the same theatrical, erratic behavior that had characterized his political career. He frequently disrupted the proceedings with outbursts of anti-Semitic invective, claimed that all of his judges were Jews, and insisted that he had been tortured by American soldiers following his capture in May 1945, alleging that his captors had forced him to drink from a toilet and extinguish cigarettes on his bare feet. These claims were dismissed by the court as the fabrications of a man who, despite his professed ignorance of the Holocaust, had been one of the most powerful voices in the Nazi regime.
Born into a devoutly Catholic family, Streicher served with distinction in the First World War, earning the Iron Cross First and Second Class as a lieutenant in the Sixth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. The trauma of Germany’s defeat and the chaos of the interwar years radicalized the former schoolteacher, who joined right-wing nationalist organizations and quickly became known for his obsessive, pathological hatred of Jews. His short temper and dictatorial demeanor, which had already caused problems during his teaching career, found a new outlet in the political ferment of post-war Bavaria, where he helped found the Nuremberg wing of the German Socialist Party before merging his followers with the fledgling Nazi Party in 1922.
In 1923, Streicher established Der Stürmer, a weekly newspaper that combined crude anti-Semitic caricatures with semi-pornographic content, often focusing on alleged sexual violations of German women by Jewish men. The publication, which reached a peak circulation of 600,000 by 1935, became a medium of political pornography, portraying Jews as subhuman predators and sexual deviants who posed an existential threat to the purity of the Aryan race. Streicher’s propaganda claimed that a single sexual encounter with a Jew would poison an Aryan woman’s blood and render her incapable of bearing pure German children, a theme he repeated in speeches and in children’s books such as Der Giftpilz and Trust No Fox on His Green Heath and No Jew on His Oath.
The publisher’s fanaticism and vulgarity earned him criticism even within the Nazi Party, where many officials viewed him as volatile, mercurial, and not entirely sane. His reputation was further tarnished by his sexual escapades and allegations, spread by rivals such as Hermann Göring, that he had raped political prisoners. As Gauleiter of Franconia, he earned the nickname “Beast of Franconia” for his brutal treatment of Jews in his district, whom he forced to sell their properties at less than ten percent of their actual value in a campaign of extortion that enriched him personally.
Despite a party investigation into his corruption and the fact that he was stripped of his party offices in 1940, Streicher retained Hitler’s personal protection and continued to publish his newspaper until the end of the war.
The tribunal’s judgment against Streicher read that for twenty-five years he had infected the German mind with a virus of anti-Semitism and incited the German people to active persecution, and that his incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constituted persecution on political and racial grounds. His defense, that he knew nothing of the Holocaust and was merely a nature lover who wanted foreigners out of the country, was rejected by the court, which noted that he had continued his propaganda even after he was aware that Jews were being slaughtered.
On the morning of his execution, Streicher ate breakfast, refused a last cigarette, and was led to the gallows in the prison courtyard, his hands bound behind his back. When the American officer asked if he had any last words, Streicher shouted “The Bolsheviks will hang you one day!” and “Purim Fest 1946,” a reference to the Jewish holiday celebrating the hanging of Haman and his ten sons.
As the black hood was lowered over his head, his muffled voice was heard to say “Adieu, my dear wife” before the trapdoor opened with a loud bang.
The executioner, Sergeant Woods, had no documented experience as a hangman before his service at Nuremberg, and it is believed that his deliberately poor technique was intended to make the Nazi war criminals suffer. All ten men executed that day died by slow strangulation rather than instant death, with some taking several minutes to die. Streicher’s death throes lasted fifteen minutes, during which he could be heard groaning beneath the scaffold.
Following the execution, his body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the River Isar, ensuring that no grave would become a shrine for his followers.
The execution of Streicher, along with the nine other Nazi leaders hanged that day, marked the culmination of the first and most famous of the war crimes trials held after the Second World War. The Nuremberg Tribunal established the principle that individuals, including propagandists, could be held personally responsible for crimes against humanity, setting a precedent that would be used in subsequent trials of war criminals and dictators. Streicher’s conviction and execution served as a warning that words of hate, when they incite genocide, carry a deadly price.