Julius Streicher

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Julius Streicher in his cell in the Nuremberg cell prison , November 24, 1945
Streicher's signature (1935)

Julius Sebastian Streicher (born February 12, 1885 in Fleinhausen near Augsburg , † October 16, 1946 in Nuremberg ) was a German National Socialist publicist and politician .

Julius Streicher was NSDAP Gauleiter of Middle Franconia from 1925 (later renamed Gau Franconia ).

He was the founder, owner and publisher of the vulgar anti-Semitic political pornographic smearsheet The striker . The publishing house remained in Streicher's property until the end of the war and made him a multiple millionaire . In 1933 Streicher was also the publisher of the Nuremberg Nazi party organ, the Franconian daily newspaper . Because of allegations of corruption in connection with Aryanization , he lost all of his party offices in 1940.

Streicher was one of the 24 accused in the trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg and was sentenced to hang and executed for crimes against humanity in 1946 .

Life

Until 1933

Streicher was one of nine children of the elementary school teacher Friedrich Streicher and his wife Anna (née Weiss). After completing eight years of elementary school, he also trained as an elementary school teacher. He worked in this profession from 1904 until his discharge in 1923. As a teacher, he had already attracted attention due to his irascibility and dictatorial behavior, according to the former student and later SPD - Reichstag and Bundestag member Josef Felder . In 1909 Streicher had himself transferred to Nuremberg, where he married the daughter of a baker and brewer in Bamberg, Kunigunde Roth, in 1913. With her he had two sons, Lothar (* 1915) and Elmar (* 1918). Kunigunde Streicher died in 1943. In May 1945 he married Adele Tappe, who had been his secretary since May 1940.

During World War I he did military service with the 6th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. He was an adjutant in the mountain machine-gun division and first a private, from 1917 a lieutenant in the reserve in the cycling troops , where he was warned for indiscipline.

From February 1919 he was a member of the Deutscher Schutz- und Trutzbund , an anti-Semitic-ethnic organization. In January 1920 he joined the resulting anti - Semitic German Socialist Party (DSP) and was a member of the DSP Reich Board from April 1920 to 1921. Around 1921 Streicher lived for a while in the forester's house in Ipsheim , from where he drove to meetings in the Aischgrund area and gave speeches directed against Jews and socialists there . After Streicher's speech on March 26, 1922 in Neustadt an der Aisch , a local group of the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft was founded there, from which the local NSDAP group emerged on March 16, 1923, whose chronicle also documents Streicher's anti-Semitism. After the dissolution of the DSP in autumn 1922, Streicher founded the local branch of the NSDAP on October 20, 1922 in Nuremberg in the presence of Adolf Hitler . In 1923 he took part in the Hitler-Ludendorff putsch . After he had always been covered by the school bureaucracy in his political and anti-Semitic activities, he was now untenable and was suspended from school work . The formal dismissal as a primary school teacher followed in 1928. From 1923 he was exclusively politically active. Together with Hermann Esser and Max Amann , he ousted Alfred Rosenberg from the leadership of the Großdeutsche Volksgemeinschaft , a cover organization that continued the business of the banned NSDAP in Bavaria. On January 12, 1924 , State Commissioner von Kahr issued a protective arrest warrant against Streicher for "national communist activities" , who was arrested a week later and imprisoned in Landsberg until the end of February. Streicher was a member of the Nuremberg City Council, from 1924 to 1932 he was also a member of the Völkisch Block in the Bavarian state parliament . An early confidante of Streicher's, who was regarded by party comrades as the “spiritual leader of the Nuremberg Gau”, was Ludwig Franz Gengler . Streicher was sentenced on December 16, 1925 by the jury court at the Nuremberg Regional Court to a two-month prison term for “continued offense of insult in unity with a continued offense of defamation”.

Streicher, supported by his confidante, the doctor, NSDAP propagandist and “Stürmer” editor Fritz Hülf (1899–1972), led a trial against Nuremberg's Lord Mayor Hermann Luppe ( DDP ) , in which he adopted the tactics of defamation and served slander. Luppe was ultimately right and was able to maintain his office until 1933.

time of the nationalsocialism

Men stand in front of a showcase of the anti-Semitic hate paper Der Stürmer . (Gaubildarchiv Worms 1935)
Reich Party Rally in Nuremberg in 1935. Foundation stone laid for the congress hall.
Streicher's speech, during which he gave the order to demolish the main synagogue in Nuremberg , August 10, 1938

From 1932 to 1945 Streicher was a member of the NSDAP faction in the Reichstag . In the NSDAP he was Gauleiter for Middle Franconia from 1925 to 1940, and later for Franconia. In this capacity he gave himself the title of "Franconian Leader" as early as the 1930s. In the SA he had the rank of Obergruppenführer . Streicher was in competition within the party with the Lord Mayor of Nuremberg, Willy Liebel , who always tried to make an outward appearance correct and kept his distance from Streicher. In the Gau Franconia, he claimed the unconditional leadership role in the party and in the Gau.

Streicher took particularly harsh action against Jews and, in doing so, relied early on and demonstratively on externally visible signs of anti-Semitism. At his instigation in 1933, a young woman who had been friends with a Nuremberg Jew was publicly denounced. This approach against so-called " racial abusers " and "forgotten" women was practiced across the empire in the summer months from 1935 until the Nuremberg blood protection laws were promulgated . The background was the so-called impregnation theory, which Streicher had taken over and radicalized from the völkisch writer Artur Dinter . In a speech on December 1, 1934, Streicher explained that the semen of a Jew was "alien protein" that got into her blood during sexual intercourse with an "Aryan" woman and from there poisoned her soul: after just one such sexual contact, she was quasi Jewish impregnation and could not give birth to " Aryan " children, only " bastards ". The Racial Political Office of the NSDAP called this theory a “heresy” and set out to prevent supposedly multiracial descendants . The disputes between these two racist beliefs within the NSDAP stretched from the Nuremberg Laws to the Wannsee Conference in 1942.

In response to Streicher's personal intervention, the Neptune Fountain , which he dubbed the “Jewish Fountain ”, was dismantled in 1934. He forced the demolition of the Nuremberg main synagogue on Hans-Sachs-Platz in August 1938, a few months before the Reichspogromnacht . From March 1933 he headed the “ Central Committee to Repel Jewish Atrocities and Boycotts, ” which coordinated the boycott measures against Jewish companies, lawyers and doctors on April 1, 1933.

Streicher propagated an eliminatory and unusually vulgar anti-Semitism , which earned him criticism even in his party. The main platform for this was the inflammatory pamphlet Der Stürmer , founded by him, owned by him and edited , which regularly spread pornographic atrocity propaganda about alleged sexual assaults by Jews against non-Jewish women and girls. The sheet, which has been published since 1923, reached its highest circulation in 1938 with half a million copies. Was known the striker for his anti-Semitic caricatures Jews and his fusion of anti-Semitism with sexual obsessions that made him a medium of political pornography. Streicher was known for his sexual escapades. Competing NSDAP functionaries like Hermann Göring spread that he had raped political prisoners. Since 1927, Der Stürmer had the motto on the front page of the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, which was incorrectly attributed to Streicher as well: “ The Jews are our misfortune ” .

After the pogroms on November 9 and 10, 1938 , in which eleven people were murdered in Nuremberg alone, the Gauleitung summoned the Jewish owners to the offices of the German Labor Front , where they were forced, with psychological pressure or force, to To cede houses and businesses to the Gau Franken or to persons named by it. The compensation payments for these extortions were in many cases less than ten percent of the actual value. Although the Gau Franken was not a legal entity , the land registries in Nuremberg and Fürth accepted the transfer of ownership. At the meeting of leading National Socialist officials, which took place on November 12, 1938 under Goering's chairmanship, an investigative commission was set up. As the historian Peter Hüttenberger put it, this encountered a “wasp's nest of corruption ” and stopped Streicher's Aryanization, who tried in vain to shift responsibility on to his deputy, Karl Holz . The commission was not bothered by the fact that the Jews in the Nuremberg district had in fact been robbed and murdered, but that someone had enriched himself in Streicher who, according to the Nazi regime, was not entitled to this. She supplemented her report with a list of other offenses and abnormalities committed by the Gauleiter, which addressed his greed, his excessive aggressiveness even towards leading party comrades and publicly violent behavior towards women. Streicher was certified by the Party Supreme Court that he was unsuitable for leadership roles. A "Gauleiter Honorary Court" removed him from all his offices in February 1940. High party comrades also considered him “not entirely sane”, but he enjoyed Hitler's personal protection. The striker and the associated publishing house, where Streicher earned a good profit, were left to him on Hitler's instructions. Streicher was forbidden to enter Nuremberg. He lived unmolested outside the city on the Pleikershof estate near Cadolzburg . By order of Hitler, Streicher was allowed to continue to use the title "Gauleiter" and to wear the associated uniform.

During the National Socialist era, Streicher gave its name to streets that were renamed after the end of the Second World War (e.g. in Fürth and Wassertrüdingen ) and was an honorary citizen of several Franconian communities (e.g. Neustadt an der Aisch , Erlangen and Schwabach ).

After the German surrender

Julius Streicher as a defendant in the Nuremberg trials, 1946

After units of the US Army marched into Bavaria, Streicher was arrested on May 23, 1945 at his place of escape, a village near Waidring in the Alps, and then taken to Berchtesgaden . An officer of the 101st Airborne Division followed a hint from the population that a high-ranking National Socialist was hiding in a house. Streicher had initially presented himself to the Americans as a painter with the name Sailer . Until his transfer to Nuremberg, Streicher was together with a group of NSDAP functionaries and high-ranking Wehrmacht members in POW camp No. 32 ( Camp Ashcan ) in Bad Mondorf (Luxembourg). During this time he was interrogated by the later cabaret artist Georg Kreisler , on whom he made a mentally confused impression. British journalist and trial observer Rebecca West described him as a “dirty old man of the sort that gives trouble in parks” - as “a dirty old man of the kind who causes trouble in parks”.

In the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals , Streicher initially claimed to have known nothing about the genocide of the Jewish minority; he was merely a “nature lover” who only wanted the “strangers” out of the country. It was possible to prove to him during the proceedings that he had been informed of the news about the extermination of people through a Jewish newspaper from Switzerland, which he subscribed to . Faced with this, he changed his claim to saying that he did not believe it. In response to the question raised many times during the proceedings, why, after knowing these reports, he was still expressly demanding the extermination of the Jews in the Stürmer , Streicher tried to make the court believe that he had meant something else by “extermination”.

On October 1, 1946, he was sentenced to death by hanging for crimes against humanity and executed on October 16, 1946 in the Nuremberg judicial prison. In the grounds of the judgment, Streicher was referred to as "number one Jew propagator". His body was cremated a day later in the municipal crematorium in Munich's Ostfriedhof and the ashes were scattered in the Wenzbach , a tributary of the Isar .

In retrospect, Telford Taylor criticized the death sentence of Streicher, who had been politically influential since 1940, as “hasty and thoughtless”: “The carefree manner in which the members of the Tribunal brought him to the gallows as if they were crushing a worm is basically unbearable". With the condemnation a sign was set against the internationally best-known proponent of racial hatred. It took place less because of his membership of the Nazi elite or his actions, but more because of his reputation and his repulsive agitation.

literature

  • Jay W. Baird: Julius Streicher's political testament. A document from the papers of Captain Dolibois . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , Documentation 26 (1978/4), pp. 660–693 (online) .
  • Jay W. Baird: Julius Streicher. The professional anti-Semite . In: Ronald Smelser , Enrico Syring and Rainer Zitelmann (eds.): The brown elite II. 21 further biographical sketches . Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadl 1999, pp. 231–242, ISBN 3-534-80122-9 .
  • Randall Lee Bytwerk: Julius Streicher . Cooper Square Press, New York 2001, ISBN 0-8154-1156-1 .
  • Franco Ruault: “New creators of the German people”. Julius Streicher in the fight against "Rassenschande". Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3-631-54499-5 .
  • Franco Ruault: Deadly Masquerades. Julius Streicher and the solution to the Jewish question . Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-631-55174-5 .
  • Thomas Greif: Julius Streicher (1885-1946). In: Fränkische Lebensbilder 21 (2006), pp. 327–348.
  • Joachim Lilla , Martin Döring, Andreas Schulz: extras in uniform: the members of the Reichstag 1933–1945. A biographical manual. Including the Volkish and National Socialist members of the Reichstag from May 1924 . Droste, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-7700-5254-4 .
  • Franz Pöggeler : The teacher Julius Streicher. On the personnel history of National Socialism . Lang, Frankfurt 1991, ISBN 978-3-631-41752-2 .
  • Daniel Roos: Julius Streicher and “Der Stürmer” 1923 - 1945. Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-77267-1 .
  • Robert S. Wistrich : Who was who in the Third Reich? Fischer TB, Frankfurt 1987, ISBN 3-596-24373-4 .
  • Anna Maria Sigmund : “We determine sex life!” Sexuality in the 3rd Reich. Heyne, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-453-13728-8 ; expanded and revised paperback first edition: 2009, ISBN 978-3-453-62035-3 , pp. 59–68 u. ö. (biography).

Web links

Commons : Julius Streicher  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Historical Lexicon of Bavaria: Article “Der Stürmer” , accessed on April 8, 2013.
  2. a b Joachim Lilla : Streicher, Julius. In: Joachim Lilla: Minister of State, senior administrative officials and (NS) functionaries in Bavaria from 1918 to 1945 (October 8, 2012).
  3. Wolfgang Thierse : Address by the President of the Bundestag at the memorial act for Josef Felder in the Reichstag building in Berlin on November 7, 2000 ( online ); very similar to a former student, see Franz Pöggeler: The teacher Julius Streicher. On the personnel history of National Socialism . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 29.
  4. ^ Wolfgang Mück: Nazi stronghold in Middle Franconia: The völkisch awakening in Neustadt an der Aisch 1922–1933. Verlag Philipp Schmidt, 2016 (= Streiflichter from home history. Special volume 4); ISBN 978-3-87707-990-4 , pp. 10 and 27-31.
  5. Albrecht Tyrell (ed.): Führer befiehl ... self-testimonies from the "fighting time" of the NSDAP. Documentation and analysis. Droste, Düsseldorf 1969, p. 70.
  6. ^ Franco Ruault: "New creators of the German people". Julius Streicher in the fight against "Rassenschande". Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2006. p. 225.
  7. ^ Franco Ruault : "New creators of the German people". Julius Streicher in the fight against racial disgrace . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-631-54499-0 . P. 267.
  8. ^ Bavarian State Library, Munich. Bavarian State Parliament: Negotiations 1919-1933. Streicher Julius, in no parliamentary group. Period 1925-1926.
  9. ^ Wolfgang Mück: Nazi stronghold in Middle Franconia: The völkisch awakening in Neustadt an der Aisch 1922–1933. Verlag Philipp Schmidt, 2016 (= Streiflichter from home history. Special volume 4); ISBN 978-3-87707-990-4 , p. 260.
  10. ^ Eckart Dietzfelbinger, Gerhard Liedtke: Nuremberg - place of the masses. The Nazi Party Rally Grounds. Prehistory and difficult legacy. Links Verlag, Berlin 2004, p. 25.
  11. ^ Franco Ruault: "New creators of the German people". Julius Streicher in the fight against “Rassenschande”, Frankfurt am Main 2006, pp. 315–387.
  12. ^ Daniel Roos: Julius Streicher and "Der Stürmer" 1923-1945. Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, p. 268; Myriam Spörri: Pure and Mixed Blood. On the cultural history of blood group research, 1900–1933. transcript, Bielefeld 2014, ISBN 978-3-83-941864-2 , p. 83 f. (here are the quotes) (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  13. Hans Mommsen : The Nazi regime and the extinction of Judaism in Europe . Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, pp. 53–64.
  14. Angelika Heider: Striker, The . In: Wolfgang Benz , Hermann Graml and Hermann Weiß (eds.): Encyclopedia of National Socialism . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1997, p. 754; Anna Maria Sigmund : “We determine sex life!” Sexuality in the Third Reich. Heyne, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-453-13728-8 , p. 59.
  15. ^ Franco Ruault: Deadly Masquerades. Julius Streicher and the “solution to the Jewish question”. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2009, pp. 193-200.
  16. ^ Robert Wistrich : Who was who in the Third Reich , p. 347.
  17. ^ Peter Hüttenberger: The Gauleiter. Study on the change in the power structure in the NSDAP . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1969, pp. 201 f .; Hans Mommsen : The Nazi Regime and the Extinction of Judaism in Europe. Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, p. 78 f. and 91.
  18. Beatrice and Helmut Heiber (eds.): The back of the swastika. Strange things from the files of the Third Reich . dtv, Munich 1993, p. 320 f., ISBN 3-423-02967-6 .
  19. ^ Peter Hüttenberger: The Gauleiter. Study on the change in the power structure in the NSDAP . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1969, p. 201 f.
  20. Eva Siebenherz: Renamed streets in Bavaria: What was the street called earlier? (Google Books) . ISBN 978-3-7380-8244-9 .
  21. Postcard Wassertrüdingen .
  22. Interview with Major Henry G. Plitt about Streicher's arrest ( memento of February 18, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  23. Joe Heydecker et al. Johannes Leeb: The Nuremberg Trial Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2015, p. 60 f.
  24. Peter Kümmel, Sabine Rückert: "One writes evil in order to achieve good" In: Die Zeit , July 28, 2011.
  25. Eric A. Zillmer et al. a .: The Quest for the Nazi Personality: A Psychological Investigation of Nazi war criminals , Routledge, New York 2009, p. 145.
  26. Source on Zeno.org , there I, 341 f .; XII, 361, 387 f., 392 f., 416 f., 443 f., 447; XVIII, 243; XXII, 624 f.
  27. Thomas Darnstädt : A stroke of luck in history . In: Der Spiegel . No. 14 , 2005, pp. 128 ( online ).
  28. ^ Telford Taylor: The Nuremberg Trials. Background, analyzes and findings from today's perspective . Heyne, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-453-09130-2 , p. 648.
  29. ^ Daniel Roos: Julius Streicher and "Der Stürmer" 1923-1945. Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, ISBN 978-3-657-77267-4 , p. 497.