JULIUS STREICHER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 August 1940, Page 9

JULIUS STREICHER

BRUTAL PERSECUTOR OF JEWS DEAD. STORY OF RECENT CONFLICT WITH GOERING. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, August 6. A Reuters message from the German frontier states that Julius Streicher is dead. It was stated that he recently came into conflict with Marshal Goering and was disgraced. Nothing good ever appears to have been written outside Germany about Julius Streicher, whose notoriety was gained largely at the expense of the Jews, the brutal persecution of whom earned him the name of Jew-Baiter-in-Chief of the Nazi Party and its archsadist. “Of all leading Nazis. Julius Streicher is the most notorious,” wrote John Gunther in “Inside Europe,” which was first published in 1936. “This rapacious anti-Semite, the Reichcommissar for Franconia, is a man of 51, barrel-chested, shaven-head-ed, in appearance the incarnation of brutality. According to 'Heil,’ in July 1933, he ordered 250 Jews who had been arrested to pluck grass out of a field with their teeth . . . Streicher organised the anti-Jewish boycott held in Berlin in April, 1933, just after the Nazis came into power. It was not repeated.” Streicher published a weekly newspaper, “Der Sturmer,” which, besides being anti-Semitic, was decidedly pornographic in tone. Once he issued a special "Ritual Murder” issue. It caused such a storm of protest in the outside world—by the Archbishop of Canterbury for instance —that it had to be suppressed in Germany. Streicher was quoted by the American magazine “Time” in 1935, as follows: 1 “With my riding whip I sometimes give it to prisoners I have taken into protective custody to save them, from the mob. Take that school teacher Dr Steinruck who used to talk so big. I went with several party members into his cell. He began to talk with a weeping voice and acted like a school boy. He did not act like the man I had expected after so much big talk, so I gave him a good thrashing with my whip.” On his 50th birthday he was made a presentation of the dossier in the archives of the Nuremberg police which “formerly might have been used against him as incriminating material.” Streicher's proudest boast was that he had cleared one Franconian district, Hersbruck, comprising 36 villages and 22,000 inhabitants, entirely of Jews. Not a single Jew remained. His general culture was not brilliant. When he came to Berlin in August, 1935, to speak at the SportsPalast meeting he said: “The great Jew who lived in England, Benjamin Disraeli, became Premier. Later he was elevated to the peerage under the name of Lord Gladstone.” “It is no use, as some sympathisers do, saying that Hitler personally deplores Streicher’s bloodthirsty brutality,” wrote John Gunther. “Hitler does not deplore it. He has been given every opportunity to get rid of Streicher. He refuses to do so. Streicher is one of his oldest supporters. He joined him in 1923. Hitler has commended him highly in public. Only two Nazis are mentioned by name in the whole of ‘Mein Kampf—Hess and Streicher; and when Streicher turned 50 (in 1935) Hitler specially flew to Nuremberg from Berlin to pay him a surprise birthday visit.”