Painful Execution of Nazi Sexual Deviant & Fanatical Anti-Semite: Julius Streicher JJ
The 1st of October 1946, Nuremberg, Germany. After more than 10 months on a trial, 21 defendants who are among the most important political, military, and economic leaders of Nazi Germany, hear their sentences read. These high-ranking representatives of the criminal Nazi regime have to finally take responsibility for their crimes and answer before an International Military tribunal who would punish them for unspeakable atrocities committed during the Second World War. It is only the first of many war crimes trials held after the
Second World War and would become a warning to war criminals and dictators everywhere. Once the true extent of the German atrocities, especially against Jews, are revealed, 12 defendants out of the 21 are sentenced to death by hanging. One of them is a founder and publisher of the violently antisemitic newspaper, Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher. Julius Streicher, the ninth child of a primary school teacher, was born on the 12th of February 1885 in Fleinhausen then part of the German Empire. From 1904,
Julius worked as a teacher as well and was known for his short temper and dictatorial demeanor. In 1909 Streicher was transferred to Nuremberg, where in 1913 he married Kunigunde Roth – the daughter of a baker and brewer in Bamberg. The marriage produced two sons. The First World War began on the 28th of July 1914. Streicher enlisted with the German Army and served in the 6th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. Despite having several reported instances of poor behavior in his military record,
he became a lieutenant and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class. The First World War ended on the 11th of November 1918 when the German leaders signed the armistice in the Compiègne Forest in France. The trauma of Germany’s defeat and the turmoil of the immediate interwar years drove Streicher to radical political activity. In 1919, he joined the Society for Defense and Protective Action, a right-wing association agitating against the newly founded socialist Bavarian Republic. Here, for the first time, Streicher displayed the fierce
antisemitic rhetoric for which he would later become notorious. Soon after, he helped to found the Nuremberg wing of the German Socialist Party, which, despite the reference to socialism in its name, espoused right-wing ultra-nationalist, anti-Catholic, and antisemitic principles. 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 in 1921 he joined the German Working Community. However, Streicher’s rhetoric against the Jews continued to
intensify to such a degree that the leadership of the German Working Community thought he was dangerous and criticized him for his obsessive “hatred of the Jews and foreign races”. In 1922, Streicher persuaded his personal followers to merge with the fledgling Nazi Party officially known as National Socialist German Workers’ Party. As one of the Nazi party’s earliest members, he could count himself among the oldest of the Nazi “old guard.” In 1923, Streicher established his virulently antisemitic newspaper,
Der Stürmer meaning The Attacker. On November 8–9, 1923, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party led a coalition group in an attempt to overthrow the German government. The plotters hoped to march on Berlin to launch a national revolution but the insurrection failed miserably. Units of the Munich police force clashed with Nazi stormtroopers as they marched into the city center. The two groups exchanged fire, which resulted in the deaths of 16 Nazi Party members and four police officers. This attempted coup d’état,
in which Streicher took part, came to be known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Its ringleaders, including Adolf Hitler, were arrested. Hitler was convicted of high treason and sentenced to five years in prison. However, he only served eight months of his sentence. 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. Following Hitler’s release from prison, the Nazi leader named Streicher Gauleiter or district leader of Middle Franconia, later Franconia.
Between 1924 and 1932 he held a seat in the Bavarian parliament. After Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into 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 to organize the famous 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.
The boycott was both a reprisal and an act of revenge against atrocity stories propaganda that German and foreign Jews, assisted by foreign journalists, were allegedly circulating in the international press to damage Nazi Germany’s reputation. On the day of the boycott, the members of the SA, which was a paramilitary organization associated with the Nazi Party, stood menacingly in front of Jewish-owned department stores and retail establishments as well as the offices of professionals such as doctors and lawyers.
The Star of David was painted in yellow and black across thousands of doors and windows, with accompanying antisemitic slogans. Signs were posted saying “Don’t Buy from Jews” and “The Jews Are Our Misfortune.” Acts of violence against individual Jews and Jewish property occurred throughout Germany. However, the police intervened only rarely. Although the national boycott operation, organized by local Nazi party chiefs, lasted only one day and was ignored by many individual Germans who continued
to shop in Jewish-owned stores, it marked the beginning of the nationwide campaign by the Nazi Party against the entire German Jewish population. A week later, the government passed a law restricting employment in the civil service to “Aryans.” Jewish government workers, including teachers in public schools and universities, were fired. A key part of Nazi ideology was to define the enemy and those who posed a threat to the so-called “Aryan” race. Nazi propaganda was essential in promoting the myth of the
“national community” and identifying who should be excluded. Jews were considered to be the main enemy. However, Jews were not the only group excluded from the vision of the “national community.” Propaganda helped to define who would be excluded from the new society and justified measures against the “outsiders.” These so-called outsiders included Jews, Roma and Sinti people, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Germans viewed as genetically inferior and harmful to
the “national health” such as people with mental illness and intellectual or physical disabilities, epileptics, congenitally deaf and blind persons, chronic alcoholics, drug users, and others. While most Germans disapproved of anti-Jewish violence, dislike of Jews, easily stirred up in hard times, extended far beyond the Nazi Party faithful. The majority of Germans at least passively accepted discrimination against the Jews. An underground report prepared in January 1936 by an observer for German Social Democratic Party leaders in exile noted: “The feeling that
the Jews are another race is today a general one.” During periods preceding new measures against Jews, propaganda campaigns created an atmosphere tolerant of violence against the Jews. Propaganda that demonized Jews also served to prepare the German population, in the context of national emergency, for harsher measures, such as mass deportations and, eventually, genocide. One of the central elements of the Nazi propaganda machine became Streicher’s antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer which reached a peak circulation of 600,000 in 1935. “Der Stürmer” which very often
presented caricatures of Jews 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 which he used to publish semi-pornographic tracts and images detailing degrading sexual acts. Streicher’s Der Stürmer became a medium of political pornography. The fascination with the pornographic aspects of the propaganda in Der Stürmer was an important feature for many antisemites. 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. Streicher propagated an eliminatory and unusually vulgar anti-Semitism, which earned him criticism even within his party. In one of his speeches, he explained that the semen of a Jew is a “foreign protein” that gets into blood of an “Aryan” woman during sexual intercourse and from there poisons her soul.
Streicher claimed that after just one such sexual encounter, such Aryan woman would be quasi-Jewish impregnated and could 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 antisemitic books for children, including the 1938 Der Giftpilz translated as The Toadstool or The Poisonous Mushroom. It became one of the most widespread pieces of propaganda,
which “warned” German children about the dangers allegedly posed by Jews to them personally, and to German society in general, by using the metaphor of an attractive yet deadly mushroom. 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 then 20 years old Elvira Bauer a kindergarten teacher, art student, and Nazi supporter. In the book the Jews are represented as “children of the devil,” evil creatures who cannot be trusted, and a stark contrast to idealized “Aryans.”
The book, printed in at least 70,000 copies, is divided into ten sections, one of them being:” The Father of the Jews is the Devil”. Works of Nazi propaganda such as this were used to indoctrinate the youth of Germany into Nazi racial ideology. Despite the “success” of his 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 antisemitism
to the German masses, he had enemies within party circles. His disagreeable temperament, reckless ambition, and overzealous self-enrichment, principally from Jewish property seized or “purchased” during “Aryanization” efforts, made him enemies in party circles. 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 glassed-in display cases known as “Stürmerkasten”.
Julius Streicher was also a sexual deviant known for his sexual escapades. Competing Nazi Party functionaries such as Hermann Göring spread the word that he raped political prisoners. Because of his role as Gauleiter of Franconia, he also gained the nickname of “Frankenführer”, “King of Nuremberg” and the “Beast of Franconia”. In August 1938, Streicher ordered that the Grand Synagogue of Nuremberg to be destroyed. He later claimed that his decision was based on his 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 the Kristallnacht, which was a series of coordinated violent riots against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories which occurred on the 9th – 10th of November 1938, eleven people were murdered in Nuremberg alone. The Jews in Streicher’s Gau Franconia, capital of which was Nuremberg, were forced by psychological pressure or by force
to sell their properties, to cede houses and businesses to Streicher or to persons named by him. In many cases, the compensation payments for these extortions were less than ten percent of the actual value. At the meeting of leading National Socialist functionaries, which took place on the 12th of November 1938 under the chairmanship of Hermann Göring, an investigative commission was set up which encountered a corruption and stopped Streicher’s Aryanizations. The commission was not disturbed by the fact that the Jews in the Nuremberg district had
actually been robbed and murdered, but rather that Streicher had enriched himself who, from a National Socialist point of view, was not entitled to do so. In addition, Streicher was charged with spreading untrue stories that Göring – commander-in-chief of the German air force – the Luftwaffe – was impotent and that his daughter was a product of artificial insemination. Göring’s daughter Edda was baptised on the 4th of November 1938 at Carinhall, Hermann Göring’s country residence, and Adolf Hitler became her godfather.
Streicher was also confronted with unconcealed adultery, several furious verbal attacks on other Gauleiters and striding through the streets of Nuremberg cracking a bullwhip. Even high-ranking party comrades considered him “not entirely sane”, but he still enjoyed Hitler’s personal protection. Streicher was brought before the Supreme Party Court and judged to be “unsuitable for leadership.” On the 16th of February 1940, he was stripped of his party offices and withdrew from the public eye. Though he
was forbidden to enter Nuremberg, by Hitler’s order he was permitted to retain the title of a 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. Despite his unsavory reputation, Hitler remained committed to Streicher, whom he considered a loyal friend. Streicher then lived on his estate farm known as Streicher-Hof, 20 kilometers from Nuremberg. In 1943, Streicher’s wife, Kunigunde Streicher, died after 30 years of marriage.
When Germany surrendered to the Allied armies in May 1945, Streicher later said, he decided not to commit suicide. Instead, he married his former secretary, Adele Tappe. In the end, justice finally caught up with Streicher after he was arrested on the 23rd of May 1945 at his escape location in the Alps. Streicher, a “radical anti-Semite”, who presented himself as a painter with the name Sailer, was arrested by the American soldiers led by a group of American officers of the 101st Airborne Division led by Major Henry Plitt who had Jewish roots. At that time,
information was circulating among the public that “the greatest Jew-baiter” was arrested by a “Jew”. While being interrogated, Streicher gave the impression that he was mentally confused. He was then tried at the Nuremberg Trials which were 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 displayed for the last time the flair for courtroom theatrics that had made him famous earlier. He answered questions from his own defence attorney with
diatribes against Jews, the Allies, and the court itself, and was frequently silenced by the court officers. He also peppered his testimony with references to passages of Jewish texts 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 for six months guarded Adolf Hitler’s henchmen, recalled many years later that when Julius Streicher was going to the court, he would always ask 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 a 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 the Allied soldiers. According to his account they ordered him to take off his clothes in his cell undressed for days, burned him with cigarettes and
making him extinguish them with his bare feet, allowed him to drink only water from a toilet, made him kiss the feet of Black soldiers and beat him with a bullwhip. He further claimed that some of the soldiers also 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 as 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 Jews. They further argued that he kept up his antisemitic propaganda even after he was aware that Jews were being slaughtered with reports and photographs. However, Streicher claimed to have known nothing about the Holocaust saying that he was been merely a “nature lover” who only wanted the “foreigners” out of the country. On the 1st of October 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. The judgment against him read, in part: “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 the virus of anti-Semitism, and incited the German people to active persecution. … Streicher’s incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible
conditions clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds in connection with war crimes, as defined by the Charter, and constitutes a crime against humanity.” Streicher, along with Hans Fritzsche – the preeminent German Nazi broadcaster, were the first persons to be indicted for what would later be classified as incitement to genocide. While Göring, Streicher’s archnemesis, 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 that he executed on that day, suffer as they all died in long agonizing death. The Nazis executed by sergeant Woods fell from the gallows with a drop insufficient to snap their necks, resulting in their death by strangulation that in some cases lasted several minutes. Additionally, the trapdoor was too small causing several of the condemned to suffer bleeding head injuries as they fell.
On the 16th of October 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 Jews’ 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. Because he fell from the gallows with insufficient force to snap his neck, his horrible convulsing lasted 15 long minutes before he died. After that, his corpse was cremated and scattered in 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. There were no tears shed for Julius Streicher. Thanks for watching the World History Channel be sure to like And subscribe and click the Bell notification icon so you don’t miss our next episodes we thank you and we’ll see you next time on the channel.