In February 1945, the leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union met at Yalta in Crimea to discuss the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe. One key point of their meeting was that after the war, Nazi leaders would be found and prosecuted.
In November 1945, a tribunal of American, Soviet, British, and French judges and prosecutors in Nuremberg began the trial of senior Nazis. The defendants were accused of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, including murder, extermination, enslavement, and the deportation of civilian populations.
Less than a year later, on October 1, 1946, the verdicts were delivered. Twelve of the 22 defendants were sentenced to death by hanging. One of them was Julius Streicher, a founder and publisher of the violently anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer.
Julius Sebastian Streicher was born on February 12, 1885, in the village of Fleinhausen, then part of the German Empire. He was the ninth child of a primary school teacher.
From 1904, Streicher worked as a primary school teacher and was known for his short temper and dictatorial demeanor. In 1909, he was transferred to Nuremberg, where in 1913 he married Kunigunde Roth, the daughter of a baker and brewer. The marriage produced two sons.
The First World War began on July 28, 1914. Streicher enlisted in the German army and served in the Sixth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. Despite several reported instances of poor behavior in his military record, he became a lieutenant and was awarded both classes of the Iron Cross.
The First World War ended on November 11, 1918, with Germany on the losing side. The trauma of defeat and the turmoil of the interwar years drove Streicher to radical political activity. He blamed Jews for Germany's defeat and began to display the fierce anti-Semitic rhetoric for which he would later become notorious.
In 1922, Streicher joined the Nazi Party. As one of its earliest members, he held membership number 17 and could count himself among the oldest of the Nazi old guard. He later recalled visiting Munich to hear Adolf Hitler speak, an experience he said left him transformed.
Streicher stated that Hitler "spoke as a messenger from heaven at a time when the gates of hell were opening to pull down everything." He said that when Hitler finished, and the crowd raised the roof singing the Deutschland song, he rushed to the stage. From this point forward, Streicher believed it was his destiny to serve Hitler.
In 1923, Streicher established his violently anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, meaning "the attacker," which he used in the years that followed to build up deep hatred against Jews. On November 8 and 9, 1923, he participated in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, the failed coup attempt in which Hitler led a coalition group seeking to overthrow the German government.
For these activities, Streicher was suspended from his teaching post and spent the following years leading a surrogate local organization of the outlawed Nazi Party. Hitler, convicted of high treason and sentenced to five years in prison, served only eight months. After his release, the Nazi leader named Streicher Gauleiter, or district leader, of Middle Franconia, later Franconia.
Between 1924 and 1932, Streicher held a seat in the Bavarian Parliament. This position gave him a margin of parliamentary immunity, a safety net that helped him resist efforts to silence his racist message. In his magazine Der Stürmer, he claimed not only that Jews were responsible for the depression, unemployment, and inflation in Germany, but also that they were white slavers responsible for over 90 percent of the country's prostitutes.
After Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in January 1933, and during the first months of the National Socialist regime, Streicher chaired the central committee to repulse Jewish atrocity and boycott agitation. In this capacity, he helped organize the one-day boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933. This boycott targeting Jewish businesses and professionals was the first nationwide planned action against the Jews.
Streicher had a low IQ of 102 and was considered by many observers to be insane. Despite this, his anti-Semitic newspaper and his speaking tours made him one of the best-known leaders in Nazi Germany. For his speaking, writing, and preaching hatred of the Jews, he was widely known as "Jew-baiter number one."
In his speeches and articles, week after week and month after month, he infected the German mind with a virus of anti-Semitism and incited the German people to active persecution. Der Stürmer's slogan was "The Jews are our misfortune," and the magazine reached a peak circulation of 600,000 in 1935.
The publication often presented caricatures of Jews and was characterized by a combination of anti-Semitism and pornographic obsessions. One of Streicher's constant themes was the sexual violation of ethnically German women by Jews, a subject he used to publish semi-pornographic tracts and images detailing degrading sexual acts. Der Stürmer became a medium of political pornography.
His portrayal of Jews as subhuman and evil is considered to have played a critical role in the dehumanization and marginalization of the Jewish minority in the eyes of ordinary Germans, creating conditions for the later perpetration of the Holocaust. However, Streicher propagated such eliminatory and unusually vulgar anti-Semitism that it earned him criticism even within his own party.
In one speech, he explained that the semen of a Jew is a foreign protein that gets into the blood of an Aryan woman during sexual intercourse and from there poisons her soul. He claimed that after just one such sexual encounter, such Aryan women would be quasi-Jewish impregnated and would no longer give birth to Aryan children, but only bastards.
Streicher's publishing firm, which was financially very successful and made him a multi-millionaire, also released three anti-Semitic books for children. Such works of Nazi propaganda were used to indoctrinate the youth of Germany into Nazi racial ideology.
Despite the success of Der Stürmer and his strong personal association with Hitler, who valued him as a protégé, Streicher was often viewed as volatile and mercurial by leading officials. While useful as a purveyor of virulent and often prurient anti-Semitism to the German masses, he had enemies within the Nazi Party.
His disagreeable temperament, reckless ambition, and overzealous self-enrichment, principally from Jewish property seized or purchased during the Aryanization efforts, made him enemies in party circles. Another reason was that he did not limit his bitter and abusive attacks to Jews themselves, but also launched them against those he perceived as insufficiently hostile toward Jews.
For example, he dismissed the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as a Jewish lackey for not being anti-Semitic enough. Between 1935 and the end of the Second World War, upwards of 6,500 persons were identified and denounced in Der Stürmer for not being sufficiently anti-Semitic.
To protect himself from accountability, Streicher relied on Hitler's protection. The Führer declared that Der Stürmer was his favorite newspaper and saw to it that each weekly issue was posted for public reading in special glass display cases known as "Stürmerkästen." Streicher once opined that if the brains of all university professors were put at one end of a scale and the brains of the Führer at the other, the Führer's end would tip.
Because of his role as Gauleiter of Franconia, he also gained the nicknames "Frankenführer," "King of Nuremberg," and "the Beast of Franconia." In August 1938, Streicher ordered that the Grand Synagogue of Nuremberg be destroyed. He later claimed his decision was based on disapproval of its architectural design, which in his opinion disfigured the beautiful German townscape.
Despite his special relationship with Hitler, after 1938 Streicher's position began to unravel. During Kristallnacht, the coordinated violent riots against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories on November 9 and 10, 1938, 11 people were murdered in Nuremberg alone.
Jews in Streicher's Gau of Franconia, whose capital was Nuremberg, were forced by psychological pressure or by force to sell their properties and businesses to Streicher or to persons named by him. In many cases, the compensation payments for these extortions were less than 10 percent of their actual value.
At a meeting of leading National Socialist functionaries on November 12, 1938, chaired by Hermann Göring, commander-in-chief of the German air force, the Luftwaffe, an investigative commission was set up. It encountered corruption and stopped Streicher's Aryanizations. The commission was not disturbed by the fact that Jews in the Nuremberg district had actually been robbed and murdered, but rather that Streicher had enriched himself, which from a National Socialist point of view he was not entitled to do.
In addition, Streicher was charged with spreading untrue stories that Göring was impotent and that his daughter Edda was a product of artificial insemination. Göring's daughter Edda was baptized on November 4, 1938, at Carinhall, Hermann Göring's country residence, and Adolf Hitler became her godfather.
In return, Streicher spread the word that Göring was a sexual deviant who raped political prisoners. Streicher was also confronted with unconcealed adultery, several furious verbal attacks on other Gauleiters, and striding through the streets of Nuremberg cracking a bullwhip.
In the end, Streicher was brought before the Supreme Party Court and judged unsuitable for leadership. On February 16, 1940, he was stripped of his party offices and withdrew from the public eye. However, despite his unsavory reputation, Hitler remained committed to Streicher, whom he considered a loyal friend.
Though he was forbidden by Hitler's order to enter Nuremberg, he was permitted to retain the title of Gauleiter and wear the associated uniform. Der Stürmer and the associated publishing house, from which Streicher made millions of Reichsmarks, were left to him on Hitler's instructions.
After his downfall, Streicher lived on his estate farm known as Streicherhof, 20 kilometers from Nuremberg, but he remained important for Nazi propaganda. As early as 1938, Streicher began to call for the annihilation of the Jewish race.
In May 1939, Streicher wrote that the Jews in Russia must be killed and exterminated root and branch. In an article produced in September 1938, he termed the Jew a germ and a pest, not a human being but a parasite, an enemy, an evildoer, and 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 be solved.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. In February 1940, Streicher published a letter from one of Der Stürmer's readers which compared Jews with swarms of locusts that must be exterminated completely.
On December 25, 1941, he wrote that if the danger of the reproduction of that curse of God in Jewish blood was to finally come to an end, then there was only one way: the extermination of that people whose father is the devil. In 1943, Streicher's wife, Kunigunde Streicher, died after 30 years of marriage. In early 1945, he married his former secretary, Adele. As he later said, because of her, he decided not to commit suicide. Instead, in May 1945, he surrendered to the Allied armies.
Justice finally caught up with Streicher when he was arrested on May 23, 1945, at his escape location in the Alps. Streicher, who presented himself as a painter under the name "Sailor," was arrested by American soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division led by Major Henry Plitt, who had Jewish roots. At the time, information circulated among the public that the greatest Jew-baiter had been arrested by a Jew.
While being interrogated, Streicher gave the impression that he was mentally confused. He was then tried at the Nuremberg trials held against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany. He faced two charges: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace and crimes against humanity.
During the trial, Streicher for the last time displayed the flair for courtroom theatrics that had once made him famous. He answered questions from his own defense attorney with diatribes against Jews, the Allies, and the court itself, and was frequently silenced by court officers. He also peppered his testimony with references to passages of Jewish texts which he had so often carefully selected and inserted into the pages of Der Stürmer.
Edward Gardner, a former US Army soldier who during the Nuremberg trials guarded Adolf Hitler's henchmen for six months, recalled many years later that when Julius Streicher was going to court, he would always ask the soldiers for chewing gum. Streicher was largely shunned by all of the other Nuremberg defendants, among whom he had the lowest IQ.
In the morning, Streicher would do his exercises on the floor, then flush the toilet and wash his face with the toilet water, becoming the so-called dirty old man of the prison. He would also make up numerous accusations.
Streicher claimed that after his capture he had been mistreated by Allied soldiers. According to his account, they ordered him to take off his clothes and left him in his cell undressed for days. They burned him with cigarettes and made him put out the cigarettes with his bare feet. The only water they allowed him to drink was putrid toilet water.
He then said they made him kiss the feet of black soldiers only to later beat him with a bullwhip. He further claimed that some soldiers spat on him and forced his mouth open to spit into it. In addition, Streicher complained that all his judges were Jews.
Most of the evidence against Streicher came from his numerous speeches and articles over the years, which prosecutors contended were so incendiary that he was an accessory to murder and therefore as culpable as those who actually ordered the mass extermination of the Jews. During the trial, Streicher claimed to have known nothing about the Holocaust, saying he was merely a nature lover who only wanted foreigners out of his country.
However, he lied. His press photographer was sent to visit the ghettos of the east in the spring of 1943, which coincided with 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 not only in Poland, but also in Croatia, Romania, Latvia, and Yugoslavia.
Even though Streicher was aware that Jews were being slaughtered, with reports and photographs, he kept up his anti-Semitic propaganda until February 1945, when the final edition of the newspaper was published. In January 1943, he wrote and published an article saying that Hitler's prophecy was being fulfilled, that world Jewry was being eradicated, and that it was wonderful to know that Hitler was freeing the world of its Jewish tormentors.
On October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal acquitted Streicher of crimes against peace, but found him guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging. While Göring, Streicher's arch nemesis, committed suicide only hours before execution, Julius Streicher fared far worse.
Streicher was executed by American Army Sergeant John C. Woods, who had no documented pre-war experience as a hangman. It is believed that he was deliberately bad at his job to make the 10 Nazi war criminals he executed on October 16, 1946, suffer, as they all died a long, agonizing death.
The Nazis executed by Sergeant Woods fell from the gallows with a drop insufficient to snap their necks, resulting in death by strangulation that in some cases lasted several minutes. Additionally, the trap door was too small, causing several of the condemned to suffer bleeding head injuries as they fell.
On October 16, 1946, the day of his execution, at the bottom of the scaffold, Streicher, a total fanatic, shouted, "Heil Hitler." The American officer then said, "Ask the man if he has any last words." When the interpreter had translated, Streicher shouted, "The Bolsheviks will hang you one day. Purim Fest 1946," alluding to the Jewish festival of Purim, which recalls the Jewish victory over their enemy Haman, who together with his 10 sons was also hanged.
When the black hood was lowered over his head, Streicher's muffled voice could be heard to say, "Adele, my dear wife." At that instant, the trap door opened with a loud bang. Joseph Kingsbury Smith, who covered the executions for the International News Service, reported that Streicher, then 61 years old, went down kicking and could be heard groaning under the scaffold after he dropped through the trap door. Streicher's horrible convulsing lasted 15 long minutes before he died.
Afterward, his corpse was cremated and the ashes scattered in the Wenzbach, a small tributary of the river Isar. Sergeant Woods later not only insisted he had performed all executions correctly, but also stated he was very proud of his work. Joseph Malta, the US Army military policeman who held the noose as John C. Woods carried out the executions, said 50 years later, "It was a pleasure doing it. I'd do it all over again." There were no tears shed for Julius Streicher.