Julius Streicher
Julius Sebastian Streicher was a German publicist, politician and convicted war criminal. A member of the Nazi Party, he served as the Gauleiter of Franconia and a member of the Reichstag, the national legislature. He was the founder and publisher of the virulently antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer, which became a central element of the Nazi propaganda machine. The publishing firm was financially very successful and made Streicher a multimillionaire.
After the war, Streicher was convicted of crimes against humanity during the Nuremberg trials. Specifically, he was found to have continued his vitriolic antisemitic propaganda when he was well aware that Jews were being murdered. For this, he was executed by hanging. Streicher was the first member of the Nazi regime held accountable for inciting genocide by the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Early life
Streicher was born in Fleinhausen, in the Kingdom of Bavaria, one of nine children of the teacher Friedrich Streicher and his wife Anna. He worked as an elementary school teacher, as his father had. In 1913, Streicher married Kunigunde Roth, a baker's daughter, in Nuremberg. They had two sons, Lothar and Elmar.Streicher joined the German Army in 1914. For his outstanding combat performance during the First World War, he was awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class, as well as earning a battlefield commission as an officer, despite having several reported instances of poor behaviour in his military record, and at a time when officers were primarily from aristocratic families. Following the end of World War I, Streicher was demobilised and returned to Nuremberg. Upon his return, Streicher took up another teaching position there but something unknown happened in 1919, which turned him into a "radical anti-Semite".
Early politics
Streicher was heavily influenced by the endemic antisemitism found in pre-war Germany, especially that of Theodor Fritsch. In February 1919, Streicher became active in the antisemitic Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund, one of the various radical-nationalist organizations that sprang up in the wake of the failed German Communist revolution of 1918. Such groups fostered the view that Jews and Bolsheviks were synonymous, and that they were traitors trying to subject Germany to Communist rule. In November 1919, Streicher joined the Deutschsozialistische Partei. This group's platform was close to that of the Nazi Party, or Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei. The DSP had been created in May 1919 as an initiative of Rudolf von Sebottendorf as a child of the Thule Society, and its program was based on the ideas of the mechanical engineer Alfred Brunner ; in 1919, the party was officially inaugurated in Hanover. Its leading members included Hans Georg Müller, Max Sesselmann and Friedrich Wiesel, the first two editors of the Münchner Beobachter. Julius Streicher founded his local branch in 1919 in Nuremberg.By the end of 1919, the DSP had branches in Düsseldorf, Kiel, Frankfurt am Main, Dresden, Nuremberg and Munich. Streicher sought to move the German Socialists in a more virulently antisemitic direction—an effort which aroused enough opposition that he left the group and brought his now substantial following to yet another organisation in November 1921, the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft ; this group hoped to unite the various antisemitic völkisch movements. Meanwhile, Streicher's rhetoric against the Jews continued to intensify to such a degree that the leadership of the DWG thought he was dangerous and criticized him for his obsessive "hatred of the Jews and foreign races."
Nazism
On 19 September 1922, Streicher left the DWG after less than one year and formally joined the Nazi Party on 8 October. He brought with him enough members to almost double the size of the Nazi Party overnight. He later claimed 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". He visited Munich in order to hear Adolf Hitler speak, an experience that he later said left him transformed. When asked about that moment, Streicher stated:Nearly religiously converted by this speech, Streicher believed from this point forward that, "it was his destiny to serve Hitler".
In May 1923 Streicher founded the sensationalist newspaper Der Stürmer. From the outset, the chief aim of the paper was to promulgate antisemitic propaganda; the first issue had an excerpt that stated, "As long as the Jew is in the German household, we will be Jewish slaves. Therefore he must go." Historian Richard J. Evans describes the newspaper:
rapidly established itself as the place where screaming headlines introduced the most rabid attacks on Jews, full of sexual innuendo, racist caricatures, made-up accusations of ritual murder, and titillating, semi-pornographic stories of Jewish men seducing innocent German girls.
Beer Hall Putsch
In November 1923, 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. For his part, Streicher was arrested, along with other key players that included Hermann Göring, Wilhelm Frick, Ernst Pöhner, Max Amann, and Ernst Röhm. Streicher was also suspended from teaching. However, his loyalty to the cause earned him Hitler's lifelong trust and protection; in the years that followed, Streicher would be one of the dictator's few true intimates. Streicher, Rudolf Hess, Emil Maurice, and Dietrich Eckart were the only Nazis mentioned in Mein Kampf; in the book, Hitler praised him for subordinating the German Socialist Party to the Nazi Party, a move Hitler believed was essential to the Nazis' success.Continued activism
When the Nazi Party was banned in the aftermath of the failed coup attempt, Streicher in early 1924 joined the Greater German People's Community a Nazi front organization established by Alfred Rosenberg. Streicher challenged Rosenberg's weak leadership and on 9 July 1924 was elected as Chairman of the GVG in his place. When Hitler was released from his prison sentence at Landsberg am Lech on 20 December 1924 for his role in the Putsch, Streicher was one of the few remaining followers waiting for him at his Munich apartment. Hitler – who would value loyalty and faithfulness very highly throughout his life – remained loyal to Streicher even when he landed in trouble with the Nazi hierarchy. Although Hitler would allow suppression of Der Stürmer at times when it was politically important for the Nazis to be seen as respectable, and although he would admit that Streicher was not a very good administrator, he never withdrew his personal loyalty.In April 1924, Streicher was elected to the Bavarian Landtag, a position which gave him a margin of parliamentary immunity – a safety net that would help him resist efforts to silence his racist message. In January 1925 he also joined the Nuremberg City Council. Hitler re-founded the Nazi Party on 27 February 1925 in a speech at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. Streicher was present and pledged his loyalty; the GVG was soon formally disbanded. As a reward for Streicher's loyalty and dedication, on 2 April he was appointed Gauleiter of Nordbayern the Bavarian region that included Upper, Middle and Lower Franconia. He established his capital in his home town of Nuremberg. His jurisdiction would undergo several changes in the coming years. On 1 October 1928, it was significantly reduced to the area around Nuremberg-Fürth. On 1 March 1929, it again expanded, absorbing a neighboring Gau. Now encompassing all of Middle Franconia, it was renamed Gau Mittelfranken. Finally, in April 1933, the districts were consolidated and became simply Gau Franken. In the early years of the party's rise, Gauleiter were essentially party functionaries without real power; but in the final years of the Weimar Republic, as the Nazi Party grew, so did their power. Gauleiters such as Streicher wielded immense power and authority under the Nazi state.
Rise of ''Der Stürmer''
Beginning in 1924, Streicher used Der Stürmer as a mouthpiece not only for general antisemitic 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 disproved the allegations in court, where Streicher was fined 900 marks. Der Stürmers official slogan, Die Juden sind unser Unglück, was deemed non-actionable 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 communications 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 responsible for Germany's prostitution rings. 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 ethnic German women by Jews, a subject which he used to publish semi-pornographic tracts and images detailing degrading sexual acts. The fascination with the pornographic aspects of the propaganda in Der Stürmer was an important feature for many antisemites. With the help of his cartoonist Phillip "Fips" Rupprecht, Streicher published image after image of Jewish stereotypes and sexually charged encounters. 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 common Germans – creating the necessary conditions for the later perpetration of the Holocaust. 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 600,000 in 1935. One of the possible solutions to the Nazi's perceived problem Streicher mentioned in the pages of Der Stürmer was transporting Jews to Madagascar.
Streicher's publishing firm also released three antisemitic books for children, including the 1938 Der Giftpilz, one of the most widespread pieces of propaganda, which warned about the supposed dangers Jews posed by using the metaphor of an attractive yet deadly mushroom. Late in 1936 Streicher also issued Trust No Fox on his Green Heath and No Jew on his Oath, an infamously anti-Semitic children's picture book by the 18-year-old Elvira Bauer. In the book the Jews are depicted as "children of the devil" and Streicher as the great educator and a hero of all German children.
Streicher did not limit his vituperative attacks to Jews themselves but also launched them against those he perceived as insufficiently hostile towards Jews. For example, he dismissed 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 people were identified and denounced in Der Stürmer for not being sufficiently anti-Semitic.