“According to reports of reliable witnesses, Gauleiter Streicher is in the habit of pointing out on the most varied occasions that he alone gives orders in the district of Franconia. For instance, at a meeting in the Colosseum in Nuremberg in 1935 he said that nobody could remove him from office. In a meeting at Herkules Hall, where he described how he had beaten Professor Steinruck, he emphasized that he would not let himself be beaten by anybody, not even by an Adolf Hitler. . . .
“For, this also must be stated here, in Franconia the Gau acts first and then orders the absolutely powerless authorities to approve.”
My Lord, both of those volumes of that report, Document 1757-PS, will become Exhibit GB-175.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal isn’t altogether satisfied that that has any bearing on the case against Streicher.
LT. COL. GRIFFITH-JONES: My Lord, it is the object of that document to show the kind of treatment and persecution which the Jews were receiving in the district or Gau over which this defendant ruled and, secondly, to show the absolute authority with which this defendant acted in his district. That is the purpose of that document.
As a result either of that investigation or of some other matter the defendant was relieved of his position as Gauleiter in February 1940, but he did not cease from his propaganda or from the control of his newspaper. I would only quote one further short extract from Der Stürmer. An article written by him on the 4th of November 1943, which appears in the document book on Page 53, is Document 1965-PS and becomes Exhibit GB-176; and it is an extract of importance:
“It is actually true that the Jews have so to speak disappeared from Europe and that the Jewish ‘Reservoir of the East,’ from which the Jewish pestilence has for centuries beset the peoples of Europe, has ceased to exist. But the Führer of the German people at the beginning of the war prophesied what has now come to pass.”
My Lord, that article was signed by Streicher, and it is my submission that it shows that he had knowledge of what was going on in the East, of which this Court has had such evidence. That was written November 1943. In April ’43, the Tribunal will remember, the Warsaw ghetto was destroyed. Between April 1942 and April 1944, 1,700,000-odd Jews were killed in Auschwitz and Dachau—I quote now from the transcript—and throughout the whole of that period millions of Jews were to die. It is my submission that that article appearing on the 4th of November and signed by him shows that he knew what was happening, perhaps not the details, but that he knew that the Jews were being exterminated.
I leave Der Stürmer and I would draw the attention of the Tribunal quite shortly to a matter which is perhaps as evil as any other aspect of this man’s activity, and that is the particular attention that he paid to the instruction—if you can call it that—or the perversion of the children and the youth of Germany. He was not content with inciting the German population. He seized the children as early as he could at their schools, and he started to poison their minds at the earliest possible date. Already in some of the extracts to which I have referred, the Tribunal will remember that there are mentions of children and the need for teaching them anti-Semitism. I refer now to Page 54 of the document book, and I would quote four or five lines from the last paragraph, starting in the middle of the last paragraph. It is a report of a speech by Streicher as early as June 1925, when he says: