"A punitive expedition must come
against the Jews in Russia. A punitive expedition which will provide
the same fate for them that every murderer and criminal must expect:
Death sentence and execution. The Jews in Russia must be killed. They
must be exterminated root and branch."
As the war in the early stages proved successful in
acquiring more and more territory for the Reich, Streicher even
intensified his efforts to incite the Germans against the Jews. In
the record are 26 articles from Der Stürmer, published between
August 1941 and September 1944, 12 by Streicher's own hand, which
demanded annihilation and extermination in unequivocal terms.
He wrote and published on 25 December 1941:
"If the danger of the
reproduction of that curse of God in the Jewish blood is finally to
come to an end, then there is only one way— the extermination of
that people whose father is the devil."
And in February 1944 his own article stated:
"Whoever does what a Jew does is
a scoundrel, a criminal. And he who repeats and wishes to copy him
deserves the same fate, annihilation, death."
With knowledge of the extermination of the Jews in
the Occupied Eastern Territory, this defendant continued to write and
publish his propaganda of death. Testifying in this trial, he
vehemently denied any knowledge of mass executions of Jews. But the
evidence makes it clear that he continually received current
information on the progress of the "final solution". His
press photographer was sent to visit the ghettos of the East in the
spring of 1943, the time of the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. The
Jewish newspaper, Israelitisches Wochenblatt, which Streicher
received and read, carried in each issue accounts of Jewish
atrocities in the East, and gave figures on the number of Jews who
had been deported and killed. For example, issues appearing in the
summer and fall of 1942 reported the death of 72,729 Jews in Warsaw,
17,542 in Lodz, 18,000 in Croatia, 125,000 in Rumania, 14,000 in
Latvia, 85,000 in Yugoslavia, 700,000 in all of Poland. In November
1943 Streicher quoted verbatim an article from the
IsraelitischesWochenblatt which stated that the Jews
had virtually disappeared from Europe, and commented "This is
not a Jewish lie." In December 1942, referring to an article in
the London Times about the atrocities, aiming at
extermination, Streicher said that Hitler had given warning that the
second World War would lead to the destruction of Jewry. In January
1943 he wrote and published an article which said that Hitler's
prophecy was being fulfilled, that world Jewry was being extirpated,
and that it was wonderful to know that Hitler was freeing the world
of its Jewish tormentors.