Text: English     International Military Tribunal "Blue Series," Vol. 1, p. 302
		Crimes against Peace Streicher was a staunch Nazi and supporter of Hitler's main policies. There is no evidence to show that he was ever within Hitler's inner circle of advisers; nor during his career was he closely connected with the formulation of the policies which led to war. He was never present, for example, at any of the important conferences when Hitler explained his decisions to his leaders. Although he was a Gauleiter there is no evidence to prove that he had knowledge of those policies. In the opinion of the Tribunal, the evidence fails to establish his connection with the conspiracy or common plan to wage aggressive war as that conspiracy has been elsewhere defined in this Judgment. Crimes against Humanity For his 25 years of speaking, writing, and preaching hatred of the Jews, Streicher was widely known as "Jew-Baiter Number One". In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism, and incited the German People to active persecution. Each issue of Der Stürmer, which reached a circulation of 600,000 in 1935, was filled with such articles, often lewd and disgusting. Streicher had charge of the Jewish boycott of 1 April 1933. He advocated the Nuremberg Decrees of 1935. He was responsible for the demolition on 10 August 1938, of the synagogue in Nuremberg. And on 10 November 1938 he spoke publicly in support of the Jewish pogrom which was taking place at that time. But it was not only in Germany that this defendant advocated his doctrines. As early as 1938 he began to call for the annihilation of the Jewish race. Twenty-three different articles of Der Stürmer between 1938 and '941 were produced in evidence, in which extermination "root and branch" was preached. Typical of his teachings was a leading article in September 1938 which termed the Jew a germ and a pest, not a human being, but "a parasite, an enemy, an evildoer, a disseminator of diseases who must be destroyed in the interest of mankind". Other articles urged that only when world Jewry had been annihilated would the Jewish problem have been solved, and predicted that 50 years hence the Jewish graves "will proclaim that this people of murderers and criminals has after all met its deserved fate". Streicher, in February 1940, published a letter from one of Der Stürmer's readers which compared Jews with swarms of locusts which must be exterminated completely. Such was the poison Streicher injected into the minds of thousands of Germans which caused them to follow the National Socialist policy of Jewish persecution and extermination. A leading article of Der Stürmer in May 1939 shows clearly his aim: 302
		Text: English     International Military Tribunal "Blue Series," Vol. 1, p. 302     Last modified: October 10, 1998 Copyright © 1998 The Mazal Library and The Holocaust History Project. All rights reserved. Technical/administrative contact: webmaster@holocaust-history.org Find a typo? Let us know.