Julius Streicher - Tainted Images, Stolen Lives: The Anti-Semitic Tabloid ’Der Stürmer’ and Children’s Readers

In Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film of 1934 Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg, Julius Streicher proclaims: ＂A people which does not hold with the purity of its race will perish!＂ This belief will consume Streicher’s life until his death on the gallows in 1946. Streicher, a devoted disciple of Hitler from 1923 at the time of the aborted Beer Hall Putsch, held some of the most anti-Semitic beliefs of the Nazi Party. After Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, Streicher became perhaps the next highly established propagandist in the Nazi Party, although berated for his crude and simplistic means of spreading the hatred of Jews. In his diary, Joseph Goebbels himself decried Streicher’s outlandish caricatures. From 1923 to 1945, Streicher published his infamous anti-Semitic weekly newspaper Der Stürmer. The newspaper, filled with vulgar stereotypes of Jews, at times bordering on the semi-pornographic, emanated from Julius Streicher Buchverlag and was read religiously in the popular display cases throughout Germany. In 1936, following the pedagogical guidelines of ＂education＂ of children in the Nazi ideology, Streicher’s publishing house originated and distributed three anti-Semitic children’s books: Trust No Fox on His Green Heath and No Jew on His Oath, The Poisonous Mushroom and The Mongrel. The propagandistic goal of the books was to teach children at an early age to hate Jews, seen as the scourge of the German Aryan population. A detailed analysis of the images by various illustrators such as Will Hofmann and Philipp Rupprecht (Fips) reveal the Jew as ＂The Other＂, which helped reinforce the hatred of Jews, leading to the tragedy of the Holocaust. Lastly, at the International Military Trial in Nuremberg, his anti-Semitic publications led to his conviction on Crimes against Humanity (Count Four).

John J. Michalczyk, Boston College, USA.