THE TORTURE OF JULIUS STREICHER

A Documentary Expose

By Keith Stimely

[Published: 1984-04-01]

„This is Purim Fest 1946!“ was Julius Streicher’s apt comment before he was sucked down into death via a gallows trap-door in the Nuremberg Prison gymnasium on 16 October 1946. He was the seventh of ten International Military Tribunal defendants hanged that day in fulfillment of the sentences imposed. (Hermann Göring had cheated the hangman the night before with a cyanide capsule, a final gesture of contempt.) It was certainly a travesty that any of the 22 original defendants should have been put on „trial“ before, let alone condemned by, such a collection of raving Western idiots and cynical Soviet criminals as constituted the IMT. But the case of Julius Streicher, former National Socialist Gauleiterof Franconia, editor and publisher of Der Stürmer, was especially ludicrous. He was unique among the convicted defendants in that he was tried not for anything he was alleged to have done, or ordered, or acquiesced in, but for what he had thought and written. In his case the Allied prosecutors made few bones about it – there was no attempt to dress up the indictment by accusing him of actual participation in or even knowledge of any „crimes against peace“ or „war crimes.“ (They knew that this would have been rather difficult, given that Streicher had held no official post since February 1940, and had been out of favor and devoid of official influence since long before that time.) He was charged under Counts One and Four of the Indictment: „common plan or conspiracy to wage aggressive war, „ and „crimes against humanity.“ No real attempt was made to nail him on the first count, and he was acquitted. On the other count he was convicted and condemned to death. As Germany’s world-famed Jew-baiter numero uno, Streicher was to be made an example of on this Point – essentially on the point of being a vociferous anti-semite. The tribunal’s final judgement was that

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