Julius Streicher was Hitler`s leading Jew-baiter and founder of the anti-semitic journal Der Stürmer.
Streicher was born in Fleinhausen, Germany, and he was associated with Hitler in the early days of Nazism, taking part in the 1923 putsch. A ruthless persecutor of the Jews, he aired his sadistic and anti-Semitic mania in Der Stürmer. Streicher was also the host of the yearly Nazi party congresses at Nuremberg and, after 1933, was gauleiter of Franconia.
For the course of some twenty-five years, Streicher educated the German people in hatred and incited them to the persecution and to the extermination of the Jewish race. He was an accessory to murder, on a scale perhaps never attained before.
In its extent Streicher's crime was probably greater and more far-reaching than that of any of the other defendants at Nuremberg. The effects of this man's crime, of the poison that he put into the minds of millions of young boys and girls goes on, for he concentrated upon the youth and childhood of Germany.
22nd December 1936 Streicher addressed 2,000 children at Nuremberg - he told the little ones about the terrible times after the war, when the Devil dominated mankind. "Do you know who the Devil is," he asked his breathlessly listening audience. "The Jew, the Jew," resounded from a thousand children's voices ...
Julius Streicher was indicted and hanged at Nuremberg on 16 October 1946. The military style gallows was placed in a gymnasium in the jail yard, a few feet from the prison where the Nazi war criminals awaited their fate.
Julius Streicher's hanging was bungled, and at the last moment Streicher screamed out the Nazi salute Heil Hitler. And at the same instant the trap-door opened and Streicher went down kicking and twisting at the end of the hangman's rope. As the rope snapped Streicher was groaning for several seconds. Just then, the hangman, lifted the black covering the lower portion of the gallows and went inside.
Suddenly Streicher's voice was still, silenced forever.
The corrupt, sadistic and brutal Julius Streicher left behind him a legacy of almost a whole people poisoned with hate, sadism, and murder, and perverted by him ...
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