Nuremburg Trials -who wanted them

[tonyh]

>>Well, you can believe what you wish. Making a convincing argument to that effect is something else.<<

The same can be said of you Charles. You have yet to post anything convincing at all on the board.

>>Such statistics do not define a "fringe" publication. Der Sturmer was no more a fringe publication than the London Times, which reaches less than 1% of the United Kingdom's population, or the London Daily Telegraph, which barely reaches 2%.<<

I don't believe you actually know how many people bought " Der Stürmer" on a regular basis in Germany. Trying to compare the "London Times" to "Der Stürmer" is absurd.

Maybe you should actually ask some Germans from the period if they even remotely heard of the magazine before stating such nonsense.

Tony

[Charles Bunch]

>>Well, you can believe what you wish. Making a convincing argument to that effect is something else.<<

The same can be said of you Charles. You have yet to post anything convincing at all on the board.

Console yourself with that thought.

>>Such statistics do not define a "fringe" publication. Der Sturmer was no more a fringe publication than the London Times, which reaches less than 1% of the United Kingdom's population, or the London Daily Telegraph, which barely reaches 2%.<<

I don't believe you actually know how many people bought " Der Stürmer" on a regular basis in Germany. Trying to compare the "London Times" to "Der Stürmer" is absurd.

I don't believe you're participating in this discussion without apparently reading the posts.

Crimes against Humanity
For his twenty-five 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 Sturmer", which reached a circulation of 600,000 in 1935, was filled with such articles, often lewd and disgusting.

You made the claim that Der Sturmer was a fringe publication. You supported this with one fact - that it only went to 1% of the population. I've shown such a criteria is ridiculous.

Maybe you should actually ask some Germans from the period if they even remotely heard of the magazine before stating such nonsense.

You're the one who stated nonsense, Tonyh, maybe you should have asked.

[tonyh]

I've asked several vets whether the ever read or heard of the magazine. None have. Two of them never even heard of Julius Streicher until after the war.

I don't buy for a second that 600.000 issue circulation was an average. "Der Stürmer" was a fringe publication that was bought by some of the party faithful. Full stop.

And I said it "Its doubtful whether it reached even 1% of the German population".

Tony

[Charles Bunch]

I've asked several vets whether the ever read or heard of the magazine. None have. Two of them never even heard of Julius Streicher until after the war.

LOL!

I don't buy for a second that 600.000 issue circulation was an average. "Der Stürmer" was a fringe publication that was bought by some of the party faithful. Full stop.

I don't care what you buy.

And I said it "Its doubtful whether it reached even 1% of the German population".

Yup, as support for your claim that it was a fringe publication.

Nothing you've said confirms that.

[viriato]

From

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/faculty/streich3.htm

Der Stürmer is the most infamous newspaper in history. For twenty-two years every issue denounced Jews in crude, vicious, and vivid ways. Although Streicher employed a large staff by the end of the 1930s, he always had the final say, "Streicher and the Stürmer, they are one and the same," he would say proudly.

In its early years there was little to suggest the paper's future notoriety. Streicher began it during his first major battle for control of Nuremberg Nazism in 1923. Anti-Streicher forces had held an "Evening of Revelations" on April 14, 1923, at which Streicher was charged with being a liar and a coward, of having unsavory friends, of mistreating his wife, and of flirting with women, the kinds of accusations that would follow him throughout his career. Streicher's response was to begin a newspaper. Later he described how he chose the name Stürmer. Wandering through the woods on a fine spring day he thought about what to call his paper. While resting under . a fir tree, inspiration struck. He jumped up and shouted, "I have it! Since the paper will storm the red fortress. it shall be called the Stürmer." (1) The story is most likely an afterthought, but the title he chose was typically Nazi. Other party organs had names like Der Angriff (The Attack) and Die Flamme (The Flame), names suggesting action and forcefulness.

The first issue appeared in early May. Most of it responded to the charges his opponents had made, and in reasonably persuasive style, but the Jews were not ignored. The issue concluded: "As long as the Jew is in the German household, we will be Jewish slaves. Therefore he must go. Who? The Jew!' The next issue carried a vehement attack on Mayor Luppe, an attack continued in the third and fourth issues. By the fourth issue too, Streicher was printing more general attacks on the Jews. The seventh issue, appearing in June, was headlined: "Walther Rathenau: Who he was. What he wanted, What he did." Rathenau, a leading Jewish politician assassinated the year before, had been a regular Nazi target. The Stürmer had become a private weapon in Streicher's war against the Jews.

The First Issue of Der Stürmer
The Nazi leadership in Munich worried over Streicher's new enterprise; they had already had difficulties enough with his independent ways. Max Amann, later director of the German press, wrote to Streicher in August 1923 asking him to cease publication since the intraparty feud that had spurred Streicher to begin the paper now was settled. "I do not know what opinion you have on this matter; however, Herr Streicher, I have no doubt that you will no longer consider it important for the Stürmer to appear when as much room as necessary will be made available for reports of the local group in the Volkswille [the official Nazi paper in Nuremberg]." (2) Streicher, however, did have larger plans, and his position was sufficiently strong to let him ignore Amann's wishes.

In appearance the early issues were unimpressive, four small pages with no illustrations and few advertisements. The paper ceased publication entirely for several months after the 1923 Putsch, but Streicher resurrected it in 1924. By 1925 the paper was from outward appearances healthier. More advertising was carried, and the pages now were tabloid size. Circulation had increased. The first issues sold several thousand copies at most, but by 1927 it was selling fourteen thousand copies weekly, most of them outside Nuremberg itself. As the circulation increased, Streicher broadened the Stürmer's coverage. At first he wrote mostly of the misdeeds of Jews and their friends in Nuremberg, chief of whom was Mayor Luppe. By 1930 Luppe rarely was the subject of the lead article. Streicher's changing view of his audience is suggested by a 1932 alteration in the paper's masthead slogan. Formerly it had been "A Nuremberg weekly in the struggle for truth." Now it became "A German weekly in the struggle for truth."

The mainstay of the newspaper during the Weimar period was scandal. To maintain his readership Streicher had to provide a steady supply of interesting and fresh material, an enterprise in which he had surprising success. Early in 1924 he printed a notice that the paper's price was twenty pfennig, and that those newsdealers attempting to charge more should be reported to him. It was the spectacular that made it possible to scalp a weekly newspaper.

Most of the scandal at first was political, Mayor Luppe and his administration were accused of every manner of abuse of power. If there were problems with Nuremberg housing, it was the fault of Nuremberg Jewry. If there was unemployment, Jews were to blame. But Nuremberg politics was of limited interest to the growing numbers of readers outside Nuremberg, so Streicher turned to the standbys of sensational journalism, sex and crime, preferably together. Each new alleged case of Jewish rape or sexual criminality received eager attention from the Stürmer's staff. The sexual material naturally made it interesting to young people; the Stürmer became the Nuremberg equivalent to an American boy's clandestine copy of Playboy. In 1925 a gentleman who claimed to be neither Jewish nor one of Streicher's political opponents wrote to his own newspaper:

Streicher always presents an attention-getting piece of news in his Stürmer. He always brings something rotten to the light of day. He wants to keep his readers in constant suspense. But what do his readers want? Sensation and fifth. Streicher gives that to them. He floods his readers with tastelessness. And who are his readers? Mostly adolescents who are still wet behind the ears. Thanks to Streicher's "education'" every lad is familiar with homosexuality and prostitution. One cannot blame Streicher for speaking about these matters. Every newspaper today does. The question is how one speaks of them. Streicher gives them great prominence. May not one be concerned when one sees the Stürmer not only in the hands of older students, but also in the possession of elementary school children?" (3)

The C V. Zeitung, a national Jewish monthly, made the same point in 1926, observing that many Nuremberg children read the Stürmer, and Mayor Luppe accused Streicher of publishing the "worst pornographic colportage literature."

Ironically, many early Stürmer readers seem to have been Jewish. After the war Streicher claimed Jews had given him valuable financial support by purchasing the paper. His statement is supported by an advertising circular from a Jewish newspaper in Nuremberg around 1925: "It is of great concern to the Licht Verlag that the Stürmer is very frequently read even in Jewish circles. We have found that large numbers of citizens of the Jewish faith buy the Stürmer and then take it home concealed in a copy of the 8 Uhr Blatt or the Morgenpresse. THUS THE JEWS DIRECTLY SUPPORT THE STÜRMER.' (4)

Where did Streicher's material come from? Each week there seemed to be a new scandal to report, and when there was nothing new, he would rehash an old one. Most material came from angry readers or dedicated Nazis. When the police raided the Stürmer office in 1927, they found that the paper received more material than it could use. Most readers, a later report concluded, were not seeking payment, but wanted to air their grievances publicly. (5) Nuremberg was a large city, and the surrounding countryside was well populated, so there was never a shortage of people out for revenge. Those who tried to sell information, in fact, were turned down. In 1926, for example, an anonymous correspondent offered to provide an incriminating letter from Mayor Luppe for five thousand marks, an offer the paper did not accept. Interestingly, Luppe received a similar offer of incriminating information about Streicher at about the same time.

What probably was typical of the source of much Stürmer material was later reported by Adolf Hitler:

One must never forget the services rendered by the Stürmer. Without it the affair of the Jew Hirsch's perjury, at Nuremberg, would never have come out. And how many other scandals he exposed!

One day a Nazi saw a Jew, in Nuremberg station, impatiently throw a letter into the wastepaper basket. He recovered the letter and, after having read it, took it to the Stürmer. It was a blackmailer's letter in which the recipient, the Jew Hirsch, was threatened that the game would be given away if he stopped coughing up. The Stürmer's revelation provoked an inquiry. It thus became known that a country girl, who had a place in Nuremberg in the household of Herr Hirsch, had brought an action against him for rape. Hirsch got the girl to swear in court that she had never had relations with other men--then produced numerous witnesses who all claimed to have had relations with her. The German judges did not understand that Jews have no scruples when it's a question of saving one of their compatriots. They therefore condemned the servant to one and a half years in prison. The letter thrown impatiently away by Hirsch was written by one of the false witnesses suborned by him--which witness considered that he could conveniently add blackmail to perjury. (6)
Since most material did not have to be paid for, editorial expenses were low. The Nuremberg police estimated that the Stürmer earned substantial profits, which were used to support other Nazi activities, a view common in Nuremberg at the time.

From its first issue, the Stürmer was directed to that lowest common denominator that Hitler thought the proper target of propaganda. Heinz Preiss, a young scholar who attached himself to Streicher after 1933, becoming his court historian, accurately described Streicher's intent:

Since he wanted to capture the masses, he had to write in a way that the masses could understand, in a style that was simple and easy to comprehend. He had recognized that the way to achieve the greatest effect on an audience was through simple sentences. Writing had to adopt the style of speaking if it were to have a similar effect. Streicher wrote in the Stürmer the way he talked.... The worker who came home late at night from the factory was neither willing nor able to read intellectual treatises. He was, however, willing to read what interested him and what he could understand. Streicher therefore took the content from daily life and the style from speech. He thus gave the Stürmer its style, a style which many intellectuals could not understand, but which fundamentally was nothing but the product of his own experience gained over the years. (7)
His sentences were in fact far shorter than the average for written German, and his vocabulary was elementary. There was never much doubt about what Streicher had to say--he avoided nearly every qualifier. As editor Ernst Hiemer put it in 1935: "The Stürmer is the paper of the people. Its language is simple, its sentences clear. Its words have one meaning. Its tone is rough. It has to be! The Stürmer is not a Sunday paper. The Stürmer fights for truth. A fight is not fought with kid gloves. And the truth is not smooth and slippery. It is rough and hard." (8)

Not only was what Streicher said simple and blunt, it also was repeated endlessly. A single issue might have half a dozen articles on the same theme. Major topics recurred so often that a reader had only to read a few issues before he encountered nearly all the arguments in Streicher's anti-Semitic arsenal. New evidence was always provided, but only rarely new arguments.

Streicher also realized the value of visual material. The message of a cartoon or photograph could be absorbed in seconds, not the minutes necessary even for the brief Stürmer articles. The first issues, it is true, carried no illustrations, but by 1925 he was running cartoons in nearly every issue, and in 1930 he added photographs.

The cartoons were certainly the most striking element in the Stürmer. Early in the publication of the paper Streicher discovered a cartoonist of outstanding crudity, Philipp Rupprecht, who under the pen name Fips became identified with the Stürmer almost as closely as Streicher. Immigrating to Argentina after World War I, Fips had worked as a cowboy on a cattle ranch. He returned to Nuremberg around 1924 and was hired by the Fränkische Tagespost, a newspaper affiliated with the Social Democrats. Sent to cover the second Luppe-Streicher trial with instructions to draw Streicher, he instead drew Luppe and a prominent Nuremberg Jew involved in the trial. The cartoons were published by the Stürmer in December 1925, and Fips joined the staff. With the exception of the year 1927, he remained the Stürmer's only regular cartoonist until 1945, drawing thousands of vivid and revolting anti-Jewish caricatures. His style changed over his career, but the essential characteristics of a Fips Jew remained constant. He was short, fat, ugly, unshaven, drooling. sexually perverted, bent-nosed, with piglike eyes, a visual embodiment of the message of the Stürmer's articles.

Though Streicher came to have a large staff, he retained control of what appeared in the Stürmer. Many of the lead editorials carried his name after 1933, when it was safe to claim credit, and interior articles often were written according to his instructions. He would read much material on the Jews, underlining in red what he thought useful for Stürmer articles. Lesser writers could then recast the indicated material into proper form.

When Hitler took power the Stürmer was already one of the most popular Nazi publications, selling about twenty-five thousand copies weekly. Curiously, Streicher did not yet own the paper. Legal arrangements had never been written out, and when his printer died in 1934, the widow claimed ownership. To avoid legal proceedings, Streicher purchased all rights for forty thousand marks, not a bad price since the Stürmer soon made him wealthy. By the mid- 1930s it was selling hundreds of thousands of copies weekly. Precise figures are hard to determine, but the circulation guaranteed advertisers climbed rapidly, particularly after Streicher hired a capable circulation manager in 1934, reaching about five hundred thousand in 1935. The print run then seems to have been around seven hundred thousand.


Table 2

Der Stürmer Circulation: 1927-1938
Issue/Year Circulation
1927 14,000
1933 25,000
No. 6 (1934) 47,000
No.13 (1934) 49,000
No. 17 (1934) 50,000
No. 19 (1934) 60,000
No. 33 (1934) 80,000
No. 35 (1934) 94,114
No. 42 (1934) 113,800
No. 6 (1935) 132,897
No. 19 (1935) 202,600
No. 29 (1935) 286,400
No. 36 (1935) 410,600
No. 40 (1935) 486,000
No. 5 (1938) 473,000


The circulation growth after 1934 was assisted by enthusiastic promotion. Robert Ley, the Nazi labor leader, pushed the Stürmer on his membership. Various party affiliates conducted circulation drives. In 1937, for example, a Nazi district farmer's organization leader wrote his subordinates ordering them to attend to the Stürmer when conducting anti-Jewish agitation. "No education material is better there than the old anti-Semitic fighting paper of the Gauleiter of Franconia, Julius Streicher, the Stürmer. With blunt plainness he reveals the crimes of the Jewish race from the beginning to the present." (9) All subordinates were to subscribe, and were to inform him that they had done so. No excuses would be accepted.

Nine special editions also were published after 1933, often timed to appear at the annual Nuremberg rally. These had themes such as ritual murder, Jewish criminality, the world Jewish conspiracy, Jewish sex crimes, and the Jews of Austria and Czechoslovakia. Print runs were as high as 2,000,000, and extensive national advertising was conducted.

The readership of the Stürmer was even larger than the circulation figures suggest, for thousands of elaborate display cases were built by loyal readers throughout Germany that displayed each week's issue. A journalism handbook published during the Nazi era claimed that such display cases were to be found everywhere in Germany, giving the paper an unprecedented readership. These cases, built in areas where many people passed by, were often elaborate structures. Usually they were graced with slogans from the Stürmer such as "The Jews are our misfortune" or "German. women and girls: The Jews are your destruction." The Stürmer regularly urged readers to keep the display cases well maintained and uncluttered. A 1936 notice to readers, for example, instructed readers to keep only the latest issue of the newspaper and Stürmer publishing house literature on display. "It is especially important that Stürmer display cases do not adversely affect the local scenery." (10) Many issues of the paper carried photographs of particularly impressive display cases, and most issues in the 1930s carried long lists of newly erected ones .

Showcases were built in places where people naturally congregated--bus stops, factory canteens, public squares, parks, and busy streets. A passerby could, within a few seconds, pause to see the latest Fips cartoon, or devote the several minutes necessary to read any of the generally brief articles. The showcases became part of everyday life in the Third Reich.

The enormous circulation of the Stürmer was in itself evidence of its official popularity, but there was more. Adolf Hitler himself praised it. Hermann Rauschning, summarizing a conversation with Hitler, reports the Führer's admiration for Streicher's work:

Anti-Semitism ... was beyond question the most important weapon in his propagandist arsenal, and almost everywhere it was of deadly efficiency. That was why he had allowed Streicher, for example, a free hand. The man's stuff, too, was amusing, and very cleverly done. Wherever, he wondered, did Streicher get his constant supply of new material? He, Hitler, was simply on thorns to see each new issue of the Stürmer. It was the one periodical that he always read with pleasure, from the first page to the last. (11)

Streicher regularly cited Hitler's praise, which does not have to be strictly true, of course. But the fact that Hitler was willing to make such a statement gave the Stürmer considerable force.

Other leading figures of the party wrote letters praising the Stürmer, apparently in response to a request from the paper. Victor Lutze, chief of the Storm Troopers, wrote in 1937: "The Stürmer has an essential role in seeing that each German today views the Jewish question as the crucial question of the nation, and the honor of having put racial thought in popular language." Albert Forster, Gauleiter of Danzig, wrote:

With pleasure I say that the Stürmer, more than any other daily or weekly newspaper, has made clear to the people in simple ways the danger of Jewry.

Without Julius Streicher and his Stürmer, the importance of a solution to the Jewish question would not be seen to be as critical as it actually is by many citizens.

It is therefore to be hoped that those who want to learn the unvarnished truth about the Jewish question will read the Stürmer. (12)

Similar letters came from Heinrich Himmler, Robert Ley, Max Amann, and other prominent Nazis.

The success of the Stürmer allowed Streicher to broaden his activity by publishing anti-Semitic books. Two garishly illustrated children's readers were published after 1936, along with a third storybook with lurid tales comparing Jews to unpleasant animals. His early speeches and editorials were published in collections edited by Heinz Preiss. Streicher's collaborator Fritz Fink wrote a guide to anti-Semitic education, copies of which were conveniently available in Braille. A series of pseudoscholarly works appeared, including a study of court Jews, a collection of anti-Jewish proverbs, and a brief work on Bismarck's treaty with Russia. Streicher also produced a series of illustrated books on the Nuremberg rallies and even put out a short-lived anti-Semitic medical journal.

Another major project was the Stürmer archives first mentioned in 1933. This grew to a sizable collection of anti-Semitica, including thousands of books in Hebrew and Aramaic (languages few staff members could read) and many more in German and other languages. There were many Jewish and Gentile periodicals and a large collection of Fips cartoons and photographs, along with assorted Jewish paraphernalia such as Torah scrolls and the tools of ritual circumcisers. The most notorious part of the collection was its large holding of pornography, which Streicher claimed was for scientific research into the Jewish question.

Much of the material was sent in by readers, to whom the paper often appealed for such items; more came from seized Jewish property. The Gestapo supplied considerable information, particularly on the theme of Jewish criminality. The Gestapo was usually cooperative, but when some offices were recalcitrant Streicher complained and as usual got action. A 1937 Gestapo memo instructs local offices to turn over to the Stürmer whatever it requested. And a 1940 Stürmer letter to the Düsseldorf Gestapo office asked particularly for material relevant to Jews and pornography, requesting all pornography in any way connected with Jews--if Jews had written, printed, published, or sold it, the Stürmer wanted it. (13)

Over three hundred people worked for Streicher by 1939, including, remarkably enough, a Jew named Jonas Wolk, who under the pen name Fritz Brand wrote particularly dreadful Stürmer articles The Göring report noted that, while Streicher paid Wolk a good salary, he refused to shake hands with him. A 1939 letter from Vienna came from a Jew who also wanted to have his material printed by the Stürmer. (14) The bulk of the staff, of less puzzling background, helped Streicher conduct an operation that reached the entire German speaking world. Copies went to the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, and other countries with large German populations. The world press regularly reported Streicher's doings, viewing him as a major force in Nazi Jew-baiting.

In Germany, even though the Stürmer lacked status as an official party paper, it had semi-official status. As a Berlin court that rejected the suit of the victim of a Stürmer article stated:

The Stürmer has the task of spreading and deepening the understanding of racial matters among the people, as well as supporting the movement in its vital struggle against international Jewry. Thus it is quite proper for the Stürmer and others to be critical of the relationships between individual citizens and the Jews. This is done not to slander the individual, rather to show the whole of Germany how each individual conducts himself with respect to Jewry. The individual has no right to complain about such criticism of his behavior, as long as it is reported objectively, since that would unreasonably hamper or even endanger the necessary work of the Stürmer. (15)

Elsewhere in Germany, citizens were arrested for criticizing Streicher or disparaging his Stürmer.

As such a court case suggests, however, even the official anti-Semitism of the Third Reich failed to make Streicher's work popular with many Germans. All sorts of protests from German citizens occurred.The most common involved the sexual element in many Stürmer stories. Editor Ernst Hiemer responded vehemently to such complaints: "You may survey the entire thirteen volumes of the Stürmer and note every passage which you think endangers the youth. But we will then take the holy books and do the same." It was better to have a youth educated in the sexual threat of Jewry than one ruined through ignorance. A later issue spoke of "perfumed women with delicate nerves and men of trmer regularly attacked its critics. One Fritz Eckart earned space in the paper in 1936, for example, when he walked into his barber shop only to leave when he found a copy of the Stürmer on display. Thereafter he would say: "I am a Center Party man and will remain so, come what May." (17) The sixty businessmen in another town who attended a Jewish funeral were attacked, without, however, suffering adverse consequences.

Even leading Nazis sometimes worked up the courage to attack Streicher and the Stürmer. Otto Dietrich, the press secretary, tried to persuade Hitler to ban the Stürmer on several occasions, only to have Hitler respond that Streicher's "primitive methods" were most valuable in reaching the average man. Hans Lammers, Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and a number of other top party figures also tried to do something about Streicher at one time or another, with the most limited success. (18)

When Streicher did get into trouble, he could always turn to Hitler for help. In 1934, for example, the ritual murder special edition produced international uproar, including protests from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Hitler finally permitted it to be banned, only after most copies had already been distributed, on the pretext that Streicher's comparison of the Christian sacrament of communion to Jewish ritual murder was an affront to Christians. Later that year, the Stürmer's ill-advised attack on a Czechoslovakian statesman got in the way of German diplomacy, resulting in a two-week ban. In 1935 the paper attacked Hans Lammers, and a three-month ban was imposed. But Streicher visited Hitler and secured his order allowing him to resume publication. Hitler revoked another ban in 1938, once again after Streicher made a personal appeal.

By 1940 such difficulties had lessened. With the general tightening of censorship that accompanied the war, proofs of each Stürmer issue were sent to Berlin before publication. In November 1940, for example, the censor instructed the paper to hold back an article on Jews in Turkey, to omit an article on Switzerland, and to alter parts of other stories. (19) These changes were not critical of the anti-Jewish tone--the worst stories passed untouched--but attempts to avoid diplomatic difficulties.

After 1940 the Stürmer's circulation dropped sharply, in part due to war time paper shortages, though Hitler assured enough paper for Streicher to keep going. A more important reason was the disappearance of Jews from everyday life within Germany. In the 1920s and 1930s each issue of the paper had been filled with charges that Jews were about nefarious deeds everywhere in Germany, posing an immediate threat to each reader. But by the war years, most Jews who had not emigrated had been removed to the East, where under the ministrations of the SS and out of public view, they were annihilated in growing numbers. Lacking the element of immediate threat, large numbers of Germans lost whatever interest they had had in the Jewish question. The Stürmer was left a journal of international affairs, not the scandal sheet that had made it notorious. Without the appeal of immediate scandal, the circulation soon dropped to under two hundred thousand. By mid-1944, paper shortages had reduced it from its high of sixteen pages to the four pages it had had in 1923. Yet Streicher continued to the end, his final issue appearing in February 1945. Denouncing the invading Allies as tools of the international Jewish conspiracy, the issue had a limited audience.

The Stürmer was published for twenty-two years. Never before or since was there a newspaper that so crudely proclaimed racial hatred to so many people. Even today, the Stürmer's message is available in anti-Semitic literature published the world over. Indeed, in 1976 the New Christian Crusade Church, a very right-wing organization in Louisiana, printed "The Julius Streicher Memorial Edition" of the 1934 ritual murder special edition (see figure 16). According to the introductory material: "Julius Streicher, German educator, writer, and politician, in whose memory this paper was printed, was a victim of the horrible Talmudic Blood Rite known as the Nuremberg Trials.... We now proudly present to you, the reader, for the first time in English, this new edition of Julius Stricher's (sic] most famous issue of Der Sturmer." The English-language version has, apparently, sold well.

1976 American Reproduction of Der Stürmer



Notes
1. The story is in a manuscript version of Heinz Preiss's dissertation in the Hauptarchiv der NSDAP, Hoover Institution microfilm edition, reel 98, folder AL 18. The final version of Preiss's dissertation omits the story.

2. Amann to Streicher, August 16, 1923, Nachlass Streicher (NS) 105, Bundesarchiv Koblenz.

3. Nürnberger Zeitung, November 8, 1925. A clipping is in the HA, 17A/1731.

4. The undated circular is in NS 71.

5. Nuremberg Police to State's Attorney, December 12, 1927, HA, 85/1732.

6. Hitler's Table Talk, pp. 31-32.

7. Preiss, p. 79.

8. Der Stürmer, No. 17 (1935).

9. Wolfgang Sauer, ed., Dokumente über die Verfolgung der jüdischen Bürger in Baden-Württemberg durch das nationalsozialistische Regime 1933-1945, Vol. 1 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1966), p. 103.

10. Der Stürmer, No. 5 (1936).

11. Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London: Thornton Buttersworth, 1939), pp. 233-34.

12. Der Stürmer, No. 11 (1939) and No. 27 (1937).

13. See the September 4, 1937 Gestapo memo in the HA, 91/1891, and DS to Düsseldorf Gestapo, September 2, 1940, in the Wiener Library Collection, VB 5, Nazi Anti-Semitic Propaganda at Home.

14. Horowitz to DS, February 5, 1939, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, Stürmerarchiv, folder 1,681.

15. Der Stümer, No. 41 (1937).

16. Der Stürmer, No. 47 (1935). Various complaints from doctors are found in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Reichskanzlei file R 43 II. One attacks Streicher for sugesting insulin was part of the Jewish plot.

17. Der Stürmer, No. 3 (1936).

18. See Edward N. Peterson, The Limits of Hitler's Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 230. for a discussion of Lammers's difficulties.

19. Fred Hahn, Lieber Stürmer! Leserbriefe an das NS-Kampfblatt 1924 bis 1945 (Stuttgart: Seewald Verlag, 1978), p. 105.

Go to a full listing of Randall Bytwerk's publications.

[Copyright © 1983 by Randall Bytwerk]

Some remarks:

"Der Stürmer is the most infamous newspaper in history". Compared to what? Does the author know every newspaper that is/was published in the world enabling him to make such a categorical statement?

"The mainstay of the newspaper during the Weimar period was scandal." As such for half of its life the newspaper was rather more intersted on sex than on Jews. At least for its own survival. As indeed is stated by the letter quoted in the article:

Streicher always presents an attention-getting piece of news in his Stürmer. He always brings something rotten to the light of day. He wants to keep his readers in constant suspense. But what do his readers want? Sensation and fifth. Streicher gives that to them. He floods his readers with tastelessness. And who are his readers? Mostly adolescents who are still wet behind the ears. Thanks to Streicher's "education'" every lad is familiar with homosexuality and prostitution. One cannot blame Streicher for speaking about these matters. Every newspaper today does. The question is how one speaks of them. Streicher gives them great prominence. May not one be concerned when one sees the Stürmer not only in the hands of older students, but also in the possession of elementary school children?

And yet "Ironically, many early Stürmer readers seem to have been Jewish." Here in Portugal we are already experiencing it. In a so-called case of paedophilia and abuse of minors every week the public expects a new politician or public figure to be detained. Who is the next one is the common question. And newspapers sell very well their stories. Especially to those presumable involved. The politicians and other public figure themselves.

But many, and I'm included, still don't pay much attention to these folklore of deprivation of public mores, for we would promoting it in first place if we were to buy it.

Interestingly it seems that it happened also in the contemporary Germany to many who were despised by "Der Stürmer". And not only from those who didn't adhere to national-socialism but also inside the party:

Even leading Nazis sometimes worked up the courage to attack Streicher and the Stürmer. Otto Dietrich, the press secretary, tried to persuade Hitler to ban the Stürmer on several occasions, only to have Hitler respond that Streicher's "primitive methods" were most valuable in reaching the average man. Hans Lammers, Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and a number of other top party figures also tried to do something about Streicher at one time or another, with the most limited success. (18)

or

As such a court case suggests, however, even the official anti-Semitism of the Third Reich failed to make Streicher's work popular with many Germans. All sorts of protests from German citizens occurred.

Worse still is that the newspaper had to be a "compulsory" reading to reach higher numbers of circulation:

The circulation growth after 1934 was assisted by enthusiastic promotion. Robert Ley, the Nazi labor leader, pushed the Stürmer on his membership. Various party affiliates conducted circulation drives. In 1937, for example, a Nazi district farmer's organization leader wrote his subordinates ordering them to attend to the Stürmer when conducting anti-Jewish agitation. "No education material is better there than the old anti-Semitic fighting paper of the Gauleiter of Franconia, Julius Streicher, the Stürmer. With blunt plainness he reveals the crimes of the Jewish race from the beginning to the present." (9) All subordinates were to subscribe, and were to inform him that they had done so. No excuses would be accepted.

It seems indeed that Germans were not quite opened to "learn" from the "brown book" of the "great educator Julius Streicher".

And what about circulation? In spite of its promotion by many inside the NSDAP the table in the article shows a maximum of 486 000 per issue. For a country as Germany with one of the biggest readership of newspapers (still is) 486 000 for a national distributed newspaper is risible.

As such I can only be in disagreement to the comment by Albert Forster

Albert Forster, Gauleiter of Danzig, wrote:

With pleasure I say that the Stürmer, more than any other daily or weekly newspaper, has made clear to the people in simple ways the danger of Jewry.

Without Julius Streicher and his Stürmer, the importance of a solution to the Jewish question would not be seen to be as critical as it actually is by many citizens.

It is therefore to be hoped that those who want to learn the unvarnished truth about the Jewish question will read the Stürmer. (12)

Wishful thinking at best. :lol:

[viriato]

I don´t know why but any 8) appearing in my previous post were not in any way intended. How they came to appear is a mistery to me.

[Scott Smith]

I don´t know why but any 8) appearing in my previous post were not in any way intended. How they came to appear is a mistery to me.

Viriato, edit your post and this time click on "Disable smilies in this post."

[tonyh]

A good and informative post viriato, thanks. "Der Stürmer" sounds more like the "National Enquirer" rather than the "Washington Post".

Tony

[Charles Bunch]

From

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/faculty/streich3.htm

(snip)

Some remarks:

"Der Stürmer is the most infamous newspaper in history". Compared to what? Does the author know every newspaper that is/was published in the world enabling him to make such a categorical statement?

Come now.

If you can think of another paper with as bad a reputation, please tell us.

(snip)

Interestingly it seems that it happened also in the contemporary Germany to many who were despised by "Der Stürmer". And not only from those who didn't adhere to national-socialism but also inside the party:

Even leading Nazis sometimes worked up the courage to attack Streicher and the Stürmer. Otto Dietrich, the press secretary, tried to persuade Hitler to ban the Stürmer on several occasions, only to have Hitler respond that Streicher's "primitive methods" were most valuable in reaching the average man. Hans Lammers, Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and a number of other top party figures also tried to do something about Streicher at one time or another, with the most limited success. (18)

Yes, many despised it, and many loved it.

The enormous circulation of the Stürmer was in itself evidence of its official popularity, but there was more. Adolf Hitler himself praised it. Hermann Rauschning, summarizing a conversation with Hitler, reports the Führer's admiration for Streicher's work:

Anti-Semitism ... was beyond question the most important weapon in his propagandist arsenal, and almost everywhere it was of deadly efficiency. That was why he had allowed Streicher, for example, a free hand. The man's stuff, too, was amusing, and very cleverly done. Wherever, he wondered, did Streicher get his constant supply of new material? He, Hitler, was simply on thorns to see each new issue of the Stürmer. It was the one periodical that he always read with pleasure, from the first page to the last. (11)

Streicher regularly cited Hitler's praise, which does not have to be strictly true, of course. But the fact that Hitler was willing to make such a statement gave the Stürmer considerable force.

Other leading figures of the party wrote letters praising the Stürmer, apparently in response to a request from the paper. Victor Lutze, chief of the Storm Troopers, wrote in 1937: "The Stürmer has an essential role in seeing that each German today views the Jewish question as the crucial question of the nation, and the honor of having put racial thought in popular language." Albert Forster, Gauleiter of Danzig, wrote:

With pleasure I say that the Stürmer, more than any other daily or weekly newspaper, has made clear to the people in simple ways the danger of Jewry.

Without Julius Streicher and his Stürmer, the importance of a solution to the Jewish question would not be seen to be as critical as it actually is by many citizens.

It is therefore to be hoped that those who want to learn the unvarnished truth about the Jewish question will read the Stürmer. (12)

Similar letters came from Heinrich Himmler, Robert Ley, Max Amann, and other prominent Nazis.

(snip)

Worse still is that the newspaper had to be a "compulsory" reading to reach higher numbers of circulation:

The circulation growth after 1934 was assisted by enthusiastic promotion. Robert Ley, the Nazi labor leader, pushed the Stürmer on his membership. Various party affiliates conducted circulation drives. In 1937, for example, a Nazi district farmer's organization leader wrote his subordinates ordering them to attend to the Stürmer when conducting anti-Jewish agitation. "No education material is better there than the old anti-Semitic fighting paper of the Gauleiter of Franconia, Julius Streicher, the Stürmer. With blunt plainness he reveals the crimes of the Jewish race from the beginning to the present." (9) All subordinates were to subscribe, and were to inform him that they had done so. No excuses would be accepted.

You've over interpreted this passage. The Nazi organization leader seems to have ordered reading, the rest merely pushed it.

(snip)

And what about circulation? In spite of its promotion by many inside the NSDAP the table in the article shows a maximum of 486 000 per issue. For a country as Germany with one of the biggest readership of newspapers (still is) 486 000 for a national distributed newspaper is risible.

Not in the least.

Here are four most highly regarded "quality" newspapers in Germany and their circulations.

Suddeutsche Zeitung 430,000

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 380,000

Die Welt 250,000

Frankfurter Rundschau 180,000

The weekly Die Zeit has a circulation of 456,000

The Weekly newsmagazines Der Spiegel, Focus and Stern have circulations of about 1 million.

So 486,000 is a significant circulation.

Furthermore:

Nine special editions also were published after 1933, often timed to appear at the annual Nuremberg rally. These had themes such as ritual murder, Jewish criminality, the world Jewish conspiracy, Jewish sex crimes, and the Jews of Austria and Czechoslovakia. Print runs were as high as 2,000,000, and extensive national advertising was conducted.

The readership of the Stürmer was even larger than the circulation figures suggest, for thousands of elaborate display cases were built by loyal readers throughout Germany that displayed each week's issue. A journalism handbook published during the Nazi era claimed that such display cases were to be found everywhere in Germany, giving the paper an unprecedented readership. These cases, built in areas where many people passed by, were often elaborate structures. Usually they were graced with slogans from the Stürmer such as "The Jews are our misfortune" or "German. women and girls: The Jews are your destruction." The Stürmer regularly urged readers to keep the display cases well maintained and uncluttered. A 1936 notice to readers, for example, instructed readers to keep only the latest issue of the newspaper and Stürmer publishing house literature on display. "It is especially important that Stürmer display cases do not adversely affect the local scenery." (10) Many issues of the paper carried photographs of particularly impressive display cases, and most issues in the 1930s carried long lists of newly erected ones .

Showcases were built in places where people naturally congregated--bus stops, factory canteens, public squares, parks, and busy streets. A passerby could, within a few seconds, pause to see the latest Fips cartoon, or devote the several minutes necessary to read any of the generally brief articles. The showcases became part of everyday life in the Third Reich.

[Charles Bunch]

A good and informative post viriato, thanks. "Der Stürmer" sounds more like the "National Enquirer" rather than the "Washington Post".

Tony

But it wasn't the National Enquirer. It was widely read and praised by the top leadership of the Nazi party and government.

And a Berlin court said of the publication:

The Stürmer has the task of spreading and deepening the understanding of racial matters among the people, as well as supporting the movement in its vital struggle against international Jewry. Thus it is quite proper for the Stürmer and others to be critical of the relationships between individual citizens and the Jews. This is done not to slander the individual, rather to show the whole of Germany how each individual conducts himself with respect to Jewry. The individual has no right to complain about such criticism of his behavior, as long as it is reported objectively, since that would unreasonably hamper or even endanger the necessary work of the Stürmer. (15)

Der Sturmer had a sizable circulation and an important readership.

[tonyh]

Bullshit.

[Charles Bunch]

Bullshit.

No, facts which have been presented to you.

[David Thompson]

Gentlemen -- Neither of your posts add anything to this discussion. If the topic is exhausted, let's move on.

[Arminiusder Cherusker1]

As a former meber of the "Hitlerjugend" I was able to read sometimes in
my office the "Stuermer".
In my opinion the Stuermer was not a paper you could identify with,
because it was so stupid and hatefull.
As I know, the Stuermer was mostly bought by the organisations of the
NSDAP and their groups, but I don't think they all did even look in it.
The Stuermer was not so important as some might think and of course
was not able to bring you up to murder jews. For my opinion this paper
didn't have an important readership.

[walterkaschner]

Thanks Viriato for posting the circulation figures for "Der Stürmer".

For 1938 they represent a circulation of about 7/10ths of 1% of the German population of about 68 million. And it must be remembered that Streicher was also the publisher of the "Fränkische Tageszeitung", a regional daily for the region of Franconia, as well as of several other local newspapers of the same equally virulent anti-Jewish persuasion. Further, one might suspect that it had a broader readership than the circulation figures might suggest, due to the practice, virtually unknown in the U.S. but prevalent in German hotels, bierstüben and coffee houses, of providing a variety of newspapers for their customers to read at their leisure.

For what such a comparison may be worth, The New York Times daily edition has a circulation of about 1.1 million, which amounts to about 4/10ths of 1% of the US population (about 280 million at the 2000 census.) I really don't intend to compare Der Stürmer to The New York Times, which is, whatever else one may think of it, the most respected and influential national daily in the US. I agree that the National Enquirer, a national weekly tabloid scandal sheet with a circulation of some 2.8 million, is a more comparable sheet, but it certainly does not descend to the depths of "Der Stürmer".

And I am not terribly impressed by the fact that some Germans never read, heard of, or paid attention to Der Stürmer. I'm quite sure that you could find hundreds of thousands of Americans who would say the same about The New York Times and the National Enquirer. So what? Apparently Hitler himself thought it was a useful vehicle for educating a certain class about an essential element of the Nazi faith.

To a somewhat different aspect of this topic:

Scott Smitt wrote, in response to a criticism of his labeling the Nuremberg Tribunal's judgement against Streicher as a conviction for a "Thought -Crime":

You are talking about a semantical consideration of holding an opinion and voicing it. I see little distinction. Speech is not an act of violence.

I think only a most minimal degree of reflection is adequate to conclude that in the case of Streicher this is a distinction with a very profound difference. It is one thing to silently hold a murderous opinion; it is quite another to attempt, as a high ranking official in a one party dictatorship, to incite others to the same murderous belief. Streicher was not simply "voicing" an opinion; he purported to be, and for many years was, a recognized voice of the Nazi Party. Speech itself may not be an act of violence, but, in the US at least, when it is designed to incite to violence it loses the protection of the freedom of speech provision of the First Amendment to our Constitution.

None of the above, however, is to be taken as an indication that I believe the death sentence imposed upon Julius Streicher by the Nuremberg Tribunal was a just one. I do not. I do believe that the cursory attention apparently given Streicher's case (as reported by the notes of some of the judges) was shocking and shameful, and although I think some penalty was in order I find the death sentence in his case appallingly inappropriate. Streicher had no direct part in the planning or execution of the final solution - indeed, by 1940 his influence and position in the Nazi Party was inconsequential. And certainly his anti-Jewish diatribes did little or nothing to induce those actually responsible to carry out the programs against the Jews. Those would have been carried out with or without Streicher's urging.

But just because I disagree with the verdict awarded Streicher (and a couple of others whose sentence I feel inappropriate) does not mean that I think the Nuremberg Trials were on the whole fundamentally unjustified or unfair. One may disagree with an particular outcome without condemning the entire process itself. And of all the practical alternatives exisiting at the time, I believe that all things considered the Nuremberg Trials were the best available to demonstrate to the Germans and to the world at large the iniquity of the Nazi regime, and the dangers that the potential evil that lies shallow under our thin veneer of civilization can be heir to.

Regards, Kaschner