Though he held no real government post, Nazi publisher Julius Streicher received a death sentence from the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II. A key early member of the Nazi Party, Streicher was convicted on the charge of crimes against humanity for publishing a fanatically anti-Semitic newspaper in Germany for more than two decades. Streicher was born in 1885 near Augsburg, Germany, and in 1909 he became a schoolteacher. He served in the German army during World War I as a lance corporal and then lieutenant and returned to the north Bavarian city of Nuremberg and his career as a teacher afterward. There he founded the German Social Party in 1919, a nationalist, anti-Semitic organization, which he allowed to merge into the National Socialist (Nazi) Party in 1921 after meeting Adolf Hitler. In 1923, he founded Der Stormer ("The Stormer," or "Militant"), a newspaper that viciously attacked German Jews and claimed that an international conspiracy of "Pan-Jewry" planned to take over the world. Streicher participated in Hitler's November, 1923 putsch at a Munich beer hall and was suspended from teaching because of it. The Nazi Party was officially banned for a time, and he headed its cover organization, the Great German Volk Community. Elected to the legislature in Bavaria in 1924, Streicher was soon made the Gauleiter, or Nazi Party district leader, for Franconia, where Nuremberg is situated.
After Hitler and the Nazi Party seized power in January of 1933, Streicher was appointed to oversee the newly created "Central Committee for Deflecting Jewish Atrocity--and Boycot-Mongering." It launched a boycott of Jewish businesses in April. But it was his articles and editorials in Der Stormer that gave the war-crimes judges reason to prosecute. In July 1933, for example, Streicher wrote an article titled "Secret Plans against Germany," which claimed that three hundred Jewish bankers and executives ran the world's finances and that this cabal of powerful executives had a blueprint for world conquest called "the Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Streicher concluded by declaring that Jews were "the people of the Devil. It is a people of criminals and murderers. The Jewish people must be exterminated from the face of the earth."
Streicher was involved in drafting the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which revoked citizenship for Germany's Jews and made intermarriage a criminal offense. He was disappointed, however, that the statutes were not more drastic. His wealth increased with his acquisition of other newspapers in the Reich, and he lived extravagantly; he was also known as a sexual deviant. Like other top Nazis, he was personally ambitious and untrustworthy, and when he attacked Hermann Goering over the Luftwaffe Minister's alleged sexual appetites, it backfired and Streicher was charged with financial misconduct. He was removed from all posts in 1940, and spent the rest of the war under house arrest on Hitler's order but was allowed to remain publisher of Der Stormer.
Even in the very last months of the war, Streicher remained an ardent Nazi and anti-Semite. In February 1945, a Der Stormer article claimed that the brutality of the Red Army, which was then violating international law as it marched through German lands on the way to victory in Berlin by sexually assaulting German women, was the result of Bolshevism, which Streicher asserted was entirely Jewish in origins. "Just as the Jewish leader Moses ordered his forces to do to the conquered peoples thousands of years ago, so today the Red soldiers under the command of Jewry behave today wherever they reach through treachery or force," Streicher declared.
In the weeks after Nazi Germany's defeat, Streicher tried to disguise himself as an artist, but an American officer recognized and arrested him on May 23, 1945. Charged with crimes against humanity for advocating the wholesale slaughter of European Jewry, Streicher was unrepentant on the stand. He denied that his newspaper had incited violence against Jews, and said that he knew nothing of Nazi concentration camps until he himself was taken prisoner in 1945. His defense lawyer reminded the panel of judges that Streicher had committed no crimes as Gauleiter and that there was scant legal basis to connect his articles to official Nazi extermination policies, but it was believed that to treat Streicher with leniency would incite a backlash of negative public opinion. He was hanged on October 16, 1946.
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