Julius Streicher, the Nazi’s No. 1. anti-Semite, whom Hitler once called “the standard bearer of National Socialism,” today heard himself described in the war crimes court here as a thief who amassed a huge fortune from confiscated Jewish property, and a sadist “who likes to beat people with whips.”
These charges were contained in the report of an official commission appointed by Goering in Nov., 1938 to investigate Streicher’s conduct as “gauleiter” of Franconia. The report was one of fifty-two documents presented as evidence by British prosecutor Col. Griffith Jones. Most of the material submitted to the court were excepted from Streicher’s anti-Jewish speeches and articles appearing in his pornographic anti-Jewish newspaper “Der Steurmer.”
The Goering commission investigating “aryanization” in Franconia found that Streicher had purchased for himself, at less than one-tenth of its actual value, a large block of stock in the Mars Works at Nuremberg, which had been held by a Jewish-owned banking firm. He, and his subordinates, also purchased Jewish homes and villas on their own terms, which were usually less than ten percent of the nominal value.
Among the evidence was an article by Baldur von Schirach, Nazi youth leader, and one of the defendants here, describing the Steurmer as having “enlightened the broad masses of the German people in a popular way concerning the Jewish world danger.” Himmler, it was shown, also praised the paper and Streicher for “enlightening” the Germans.
Col. Jones also read the following passage written by Streicher for the Nov. 4, 1943 issue of the Steurmer: “It is really the truth that the Jews have, so to speak, disappeared from Europe, and that the Jewish reservoir in the East, from where the Jewish plague has for centuries beset Europe’s people, has ceased to exist. However, the German people at the war’s beginning prophesied what has now come to pass.”
Presenting the case against Hans Frank, Nazi ruler of Poland, Lieut. Col. W. H. Baldwin, an associate U.S. prosecutor, charged that in 1941 Frank doomed 1,200,000 Jews to death by starvation, ordering that only 300,000 of the estimated 1,500,000 Polish Jews who were still alive would be provided with food, because they were being used as forced labor by the Germans.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
