Streicher Julius - Julius Streicher Nazi editor of the notorious anti-semitic newspaper Der Stürmer

JULIUS
STREICHER

Julius Streicher (far left) and Adolf Hitler at the 1927 Nuremberg Rally.

by Randall L. Bytwerk

with a new afterword

First Cooper Square Press Edition 2001

This Cooper Square Press paperback edition of Julius Streicher is an unabridged republication of the edition published in New York in 1983, with fifty textual emendations and the addition of a new afterword by the author. It is reprinted by arrangement with the author.

Copyright 1983 by Randall L. Bytwerk
New afterword copyright 2001 by Randall L. Bytwerk

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Published by Cooper Square Press
An Imprint of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
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New York, New York 10011

Distributed by National Book Network

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bytwerk, Randall L.

Julius Streicher : Nazi Editor of the notorious anti-Semitic newspaper Der Strmer / Randall L. Bytwerk.1st Cooper Square Press ed.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York : Stein and Day, 1983.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-0-8154-1156-7

1. AntisemitismGermany. 2. Streicher, Julius, 18851946. 3. Strmer. 4. GermanyEthnic relations. I. Title.

DS146.G4 B98 2001
305.892'4043dc21

2001028990

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.481992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.

TO
Sharon Van Haitsma Bytwerk,
Heavens last best gift,
my ever new delight

Illustrations between

Why did the Germans kill six million Jews? There are dozens of books on what one might call the technology of the Holocaust, the operation of the death camps, but far fewer on the forces that led a civilized nation to commit, condone, or ignore genocide. Most Germans, of course, had no part in the death camps, indeed did not know that Jews were being annihilated by the millions. Yet almost all Germans had seen the intensifying persecution of the Jews that began in 1933. Few Germans had protested. Few Germans had been interested in knowing where all the Jews had gone.

This book looks at part of what persuaded Germans to stand by while their Jewish fellow citizens were persecutedthe anti-Semitic propaganda of Julius Streicher, World Jew-baiter No. 1, the most vicious and prolific of the Nazi anti-Semites. Streicher and his like did not persuade all or even most Germans to hate Jews. But they did establish an attitude of indifference toward Jews without which the Holocaust could not have occurred.

I owe thanks to many people who have helped me to write this book. Professor Robert D. Brooks first interested me in the subject and has given much help over the years. Professor David Zarefsky had valuable advice. Northwestern University and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale gave travel support. My colleagues of the Department of Speech Communication at SIU made my work easier by their example and good cheer. The book was finished during a sabbatical semester provided by Southern Illinois University.

Librarians and archivists have made their usual quiet but essential contributions. I owe particular thanks to the splendid staff at the Wiener Library, and to the late Dr. Arnd Mller of Nuremberg, whose guide to the Strmerarchiv saved me much work. The Hoover Institution at Stanford University provided many of the illustrations. Jim Jennings helped out with photography.

The editors of the Wiener Library Bulletin and Journalism History gave permission to incorporate material into this book that originally appeared in their journals, and the editor of the Christian Vanguard allowed me to use material from his newspaper.

JULIUS
STREICHER

Julius Streicher was the seventh of ten Nazi war criminals to hang on the morning of October 16, 1946. All had been among the most powerful and dangerous of Hitlers agents in Germanys war against the world. Streicher remained loyal to the end. Only he shouted the old cry Heil Hitler! as he neared the gallows. On the platform, glaring at the Allied press correspondents gathered to watch the hangings, he yelled Purim Festival 1946!referring to the biblical Book of Esther, which describes how Haman was executed on the gallows he had intended for the Jews. The Bolshevists will hang you one day, he added as final preparations were made. His body was cremated with those of the other Nazi leaders and the ashes, ironically under the cover name Abraham Goldberg, were scattered into a small stream near Munich.

He had been among the most despicable men of the Nazi movement, scorned and hated by the broader world and even by many of his fellow Nazis. For twenty-five years he had hated the Jews. Called World Jew-baiter No. 1, the biggest bigot in the world, and the high priest of stupidity, Streichers weekly newspaper Der Strmer had been devoted entirely to rousing racial hatred. It had been one of the most widely circulated papers in Germany, the one paper Hitler himself claimed to read from cover to cover. The Allies brought him to trial not because of his central role in the Nazi government or because of any direct part in implementing the Holocaust, but because in the words of the indictment his propaganda had left a legacy of almost a whole people poisoned with hate, sadism, and murder. Others had carried out the Holocaust; Streicher had prepared the ground.

Julius Streichers early life hardly suggested that he would die universally despised. Born on February 12, 1885, in Fleinhausen, a small village fifteen miles west of the Bavarian town of Augsburg, he was the ninth child of the village schoolmaster. An ill-paid man with so large a family could scarcely support it easily, but Streichers memories of his childhood were happy. His mother, whom he later called the fortress of my childhood, cheerfully accepted the view that women should be concerned with children, kitchen, and church, a model of what the Nazis were later to urge on all German womanhood. Herr Streicher, a firm father, had the respect and admiration of his children, it seems, since five of his seven surviving children followed him into the teaching profession.

The rural village in which Streicher grew up was strongly Catholic. Its citizens were poorly educated men and women with no false confidence in human nature. Jews were not often seen, but the villagers thought they knew a great deal about them. Generations of rumor and myth had made Jews into mysterious and dangerous creatures, capable of the worst behavior. Early in his life Streicher absorbed the prevailing anti-Semitism. When he was five his mother ordered fabric from a Jewish shop in a neighboring town; on delivery, the fabric was adjudged of inferior quality. That, Streichers mother told her son in tears, was just like a Jew. The village priest in his regular periods of religious instruction in the school explained how the Jews had fought Christ bitterly, finally crucifying him. That was my first inkling that the nature of the Jews was peculiar, he later wrote. These incidents, and surely there were others, did not make Streicher the blustering anti-Semite he would become, but they helped to establish the foundation for his Jew-baiting career.