Julius Streicher

Julius Streicher (12 February 1885 – 16 October 1946) was a member of the Nazi Party, the Gauleiter (regional leader) 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 multi-millionaire.

After the war, Streicher was convicted of crimes against humanity at the end of 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.

Streicher was born in Fleinhausen, in the Kingdom of Bavaria, one of nine children of the teacher Friedrich Streicher and his wife Anna (née Weiss).

He worked as an elementary school teacher, as his father had.

In 1913, Streicher married Kunigunde Roth, a baker's daughter, in Nuremberg.

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 (lieutenant), 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.

They had two sons, Lothar (born 1915) and Elmar (born 1918).

Upon his return, Streicher took up another teaching position there but something unknown happened in 1919, which turned him into a "radical anti-Semite".

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 (German Nationalist Protection and Defense Federation), 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.

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 (1881–1936); 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.

In 1920 Streicher turned to the Deutschsozialistische Partei (German Socialist Party, DSP), a group whose platform was close to that of the Nazi Party, or Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (National Socialist German Workers' Party or NSDAP).

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 1921, the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft (German Working Community), which 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 Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft thought he was dangerous and criticized him for his obsessive "hatred of the Jews and foreign races."

In 1921, Streicher left the German Socialist Party and joined the Nazi Party, bringing with him enough members of the DSP to almost double the size of the Nazi Party overnight.

He would later claim 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:

"It was on a winter's day in 1922. I sat unknown in the large hall of the Bürgerbräuhaus ... suspense was in the air. Everyone seemed tense with excitement, with anticipation. Then suddenly a shout. "Hitler is coming!" Thousands of men and women jumped to their feet as if propelled by a mysterious power ... they shouted, "Heil Hitler!

Heil Hitler!" ... And then he stood on the podium ... Then I knew that in this Adolf Hitler was someone extraordinary ... Here was one who could wrest out of the German spirit and the German heart the power to break the chains of slavery. Yes! Yes! This man spoke as a messenger from heaven at a time when the gates of hell were opening to pull down everything. And when he finally finished, and while the crowd raised the roof with the singing of the "Deutschland" song, I rushed to the stage."

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 (The Stormer, or, loosely, The Attacker).

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:

"[Der Stürmer] 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."

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.

As a result of his participation in the attempted Putsch, Streicher was suspended from teaching.

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.