Der Stürmer (The Attacker) was a weekly antisemitic tabloid published by Julius Streicher from 1923 to 1945. It was not the official organ of the Nazi Party and it was occasionally an embarrassment to senior party figures, including Himmler and Goebbels, who considered it vulgar. None of them suppressed it. At its peak in the mid-1930s it had a circulation of around 500,000 and was displayed in prominent street-corner showcases across Germany. Streicher was convicted at Nuremberg of crimes against humanity and hanged in October 1946.
Content and character
Der Stürmer specialised in a form of antisemitism that was simultaneously pornographic and violent, combining fabricated news stories, lurid sexual imagery, and accusations of ritual murder to dehumanise Jews and incite violence. Its front-page caricatures, drawn by Philipp Rupprecht under the pseudonym Fips, depicted Jews with grotesquely exaggerated features as sexual predators, financial manipulators, and practitioners of blood sacrifice. The paper regularly revived the medieval blood libel, the accusation that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, presenting it as current news. The sexual content was deliberate: associating Jews with sexual threat created visceral fear and hostility that went beyond intellectual disagreement to emotional revulsion.
The paper’s masthead carried the slogan “Die Juden sind unser Unglück” (The Jews are our misfortune), a phrase taken from the nineteenth-century historian Heinrich von Treitschke. Each issue typically carried several articles presenting fabricated accounts of Jewish sexual crimes, financial swindles, and ritual murders, alongside Streicher’s editorial commentary and readers’ letters reporting alleged Jewish misconduct in their communities. The paper encouraged readers to submit denunciations of Jews in their localities.
Display and reach
Der Stürmer was displayed in special glass-fronted showcases, Stürmerkasten, installed in public places throughout Germany: on streets, in factory canteens, in school corridors, in railway stations. The showcases were designed to attract readers who would not buy the paper directly. They made the paper’s content part of the visual environment of German public life throughout the Nazi period. Schoolchildren were required in some regions to read it as part of their education. Special issues aimed at children, with simplified versions of the blood libel and other accusations, were published and distributed through schools.
The paper’s relationship with the Nazi Party hierarchy was complicated. Hitler personally endorsed Streicher and Der Stürmer. Goebbels, who ran the official propaganda apparatus, regarded Streicher as a liability and Der Stürmer as counterproductive: its pornographic character was embarrassing in foreign policy contexts, and several European governments protested formally to Berlin about its content. But the paper continued to publish until the last weeks of the war.
Streicher at Nuremberg
Julius Streicher was tried at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg on charges of crimes against humanity. His defence was that he was a journalist and publisher, not a participant in the physical killings. The tribunal rejected this. The judgment found that Streicher’s “incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds in connection with war crimes.” The tribunal concluded that Streicher’s publication had contributed to creating the psychological and cultural conditions in which the genocide was possible. He was hanged at Nuremberg prison on 16 October 1946.
See also
Sources
- Randall Bytwerk (ed.), Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semitic Newspaper Der Stürmer, Cooper Square Press, 2001
- International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol. I (Judgment: Julius Streicher), Nuremberg, 1947
- Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power, Allen Lane, 2005
- Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945, Oxford University Press, 1990
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Der Stürmer, encyclopedia.ushmm.org