A Deadly Lie: Streicher's Campaign to Criminalize the Jewish People

On October 16th, 1946, Julius Streicher was executed in Nuremberg. Ever so loyal to the Nazi cause, as he approached the gallows, he yelled out “Heil Hitler!”and once he was at the gallows, he screamed “Purim festival 1946!” Streicher was well-versed in the Jewish culture he detested and understood the significance of an enemy of the Jews being hanged. Dubbed the “World Jew-baiter No.1”, Streicher founded and published Der Sturmer, a popular German newspaper entirely devoted to radical antisemitic propaganda that successfully poisoned Germans with lethal hatred of the Jew. Dr. Randall Bytwerk, an eminent scholar of Nazi propaganda, argues that while the other Nazi criminals were executed for implementing the Holocaust, he was incriminated for laying its groundwork.

Streicher founded Der Sturmer in 1923. The newspaper was low-brow and thus accessible to the German masses. Philipp Rupprecht, known by his pen name “Fips”, made Sturmer even more “user friendly” with his exaggerated antisemitic caricatures. Streicher knew that for the average German to view Jewry - who comprised less than 1% of the German population - as an urgent personal  threat, he could not rely only on abstract tropes of international Jewish conspiracy. Streicher would need to show that the Jew was every German’s misfortune: simultaneously the classmate tricking innocent Aryan children into staying out late drinking, the sexual deviant preying on your pure daughter, the cunning butcher feeding you tainted sausages made from a freshly murdered Christian child’s blood.

In reviving the medieval blood libel, Streicher was particularly inspired by an 1803 book written by a Jewish convert to Christianity who explained that his father, a prominent rabbi, trained him to kill Christians on Purim and Passover respectively. He was taught to mix the innocent blood in their wine and bread for the Sabbath, always saving some leftover blood for Jewish pregnant women, elderly and newlywed couples. Bytwerk argues in his book Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Antisemitic Newspaper Der Sturmer that it was psychologically easier for people to digest and genuinely believe grand lies than small ones. The millions of Sturmer readers - who were already eager to be fed libels - did not critically question the newspaper’s constant trope whereby the Talmud commands Jews to slaughter Gentiles the way they mirthlessly slaughter animals. A 1939 issue corroborates the horrors with a detailed page of photos from the Vienna fish market whereby Jews take casual trips to gleefully watch live fish being killed. A 1936 article describes the glee a Jewish slaughterer takes in bleeding a cow dry. It is a very explicit metaphor - and urgent warning - of the Jew’s plans for dealing with Germans.

Another myth Der Sturmer propagated was the Jewish monopoly over the German press. Streicher’s logic was simple: the Jewish dominion over the press explained why such shocking and widespread Jewish crimes went underreported. Jews, according to a 1929 Fips cartoon showing an overweight Jews stomping on the corpses of Germans who had just killed themselves, manipulated German women to get abortions and for German men to commit suicide, to steal the jobs of hardworking German fathers and to thwart the growth of the German population.

Streicher’s major antisemitic innovation was his accusation of Jewish sex crimes. Before Streicher, the idea that the Jew was raping innocent women across Europe was not a prevalent focus amongst antisemites. In 1938, the Nuremberg Chief of Police gifted Streicher with this propaganda album titled “Jewish Criminals,” a photographic collection of Jewish men and women accused of the sexual crimes about which he consistently warned Germany.

Photo #1 shows Otto Feuchtwanger who was arrested for supposedly attempting to seduce a young German woman. Streicher genuinely believed that to violate a German woman was a supreme mitzvah, or religious obligation, that Jewish women were even honored to see their husbands sleeping with Gentile women. He argued that they saw it as a source of pride and devotion to their God rather than infidelity. Jewish mothers do not want what a normal, healthy mother wants for her innocent child: rather, they encourage them to exploit their German servants, even if they were as young as three years old. Not only did the Talmud sanctify this kind of sexual abuse of German women, Streicher maintained, the Jew sought to sleep with German women because he knew that this ruined her “racial purity.”Photo #2 shows Dr. Ernst Seckendorf who was accused of having sexual relations with a German woman. Seckendorf was murdered in Auschwitz in February 1943. Photo #3 presents Max Hahn who was charged with fraternizing with a prostitute on the street in November 1937. In March 1942, he was deported from Nuremberg to the Izbica Ghetto in occupied Poland; his fate is unknown. Their alleged crime, other than being Jewish men in Europe, was racial defilement. Streicher argued that when a German woman slept with a Jewish man several times, she herself gradually transformed into a “Jewess,” her blood now poisoned. Streicher describes the German victims of Jewish sexual criminals as dying inside, losing their pure souls and developing empty Jewish souls instead. Fips drew cartoons of a Jewish man hypnotizing German girls into a sexual relationship.

Streicher emphasized that German women were not the only endangered victims: Jewish homosexuals also preyed on young German men. A 1938 Sturmer article rhetorically asked One Oberlander, a queer Jew who was accused of sexually harassing 800 young men: “How many thousands and thousands of healthy young boys and young men have been destroyed by this Jew?''  Photo #4 here shows Ernit Wilmersdoerfer who was accused of seducing a 17 year old boy, a testament to the popular Nazi belief that Jewish men were “pseudo women,” effeminate and the antithesis of their own “hypermasculinity.” Wilmersdoerfer was not only severely humiliated with such an awful indictment but he was also sentenced to one year and four months in a Nazi prison. He was “lucky”: he was eventually released and he managed to escape to England in February 1939. Wilmersdoerfer was one of the 30,000 German Jews who by 1945 had emigrated to the U.K; most of their family and friends who did not leave were murdered in concentration camps.

Gradually, some prominent Nazi figures started to disassociate themselves with Streicher, who they deemed as a degenerate liability as he was consistently embroiled in libel suits, problematic business deals and pornographic scandals. Streicher’s influence continued to wane: his newspaper in his beloved Nuremberg was shut down, Hitler officially silenced him in 1939, and Herman Goering’s 1940 investigation into his business deals resulted in his expulsion from the Nazi Party. After Germany’s defeat, Streicher was arrested by American soldiers who brought him to the Nuremberg trials of crimes against humanity.

At Yad Vashem, we remember German Jewry for their profound contributions across a wide spectrum of cultural and intellectual life. The museum’s gallery of German Jewish life spotlights the exceptional thinkers raised by the German Jewish community like Walter Benjamin, a prolific intellectual who pioneered modern urban studies and the philosophy of history who tragically ended his remarkable life by committing suicide as he was on the run escaping Nazi persecution. Yad Vashem tells the story of Dr. Hermann Zondek who rose to prominence in the medical community after serving valiantly as a doctor in the trenches of World War One and became director of a major hospital in Berlin. In 1933  Nazi stormtroopers forced Zondek to leave Germany; he emigrated to Israel where he became a leading physician and researcher in metabolic diseases, shaping the young Jewish state’s medical scene. Ultimately, the Nazi dehumanization of Jewry drained Germany and eventually Europe at large of some of its finest writers, scientists, doctors and citizens.