LIEUTENANT COLONEL M. C. GRIFFITH-JONES (Junior Counsel for the United Kingdom): If the Tribunal please, it is my duty to present the case against the Defendant Julius Streicher.
Appendix A of the Indictment, that paragraph of the Appendix relating to Streicher, sets out the positions which he held and which I shall prove. It then goes on to allege that he used those positions and his personal influence and his close connection with the Führer in such a manner that he promoted the accession to power of the Nazi conspirators and the consolidation of their control over Germany, as set forth in Count One of the Indictment; that he authorized, directed, and participated in the Crimes against Humanity, set forth in Count Four of the Indictment, including particularly the incitement of the persecution of the Jews, set forth in Count One and Count Four of the Indictment.
My Lord, the case against this defendant can be, perhaps, described by the unofficial title that he assumed for himself as “Jew-baiter Number One.” It is the Prosecution’s case that for the course of some 25 years this man educated the whole of the German people in hatred and that he incited them to the persecution and to the extermination of the Jewish race. He was an accessory to murder, perhaps on a scale never attained before.
With the Tribunal’s permission I propose to prove quite shortly the position and influence that he held and then to refer the Tribunal to several short extracts from his newspapers and from his speeches and then to outline the part that he played in the particular persecutions that occurred against the Jews between the years 1933 and 1945.
My Lord, perhaps before I start, I might say that the document book before the members of the Tribunal is arranged in the order in which I intend to refer to the documents. They are paged and there is an index at the beginning of the book and if the Tribunal have got what is called the trial brief, it is in effect a note of the evidence to which I shall refer and again in the order in which I shall refer to it, which may be of some assistance.
My Lord, this defendant was born in 1885. He became a school teacher in Nuremberg and formed a party of his own, which he called the German Socialist Party. The chief policy of that party, again, was anti-Semitism. In 1922 he handed over his party to Hitler; and there is a glowing account of his generosity which appears in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which I do not think it worth occupying the time of the Tribunal in reading. It appears as Document M-3, and is the first document in the Tribunal’s document book. The copy of Mein Kampf is already before the Tribunal as Exhibit GB-128.
The appointments that he held in the Party and State were few. From 1921 until 1945 he was a member of the Nazi Party. In 1925 he was appointed Gauleiter of Franconia, and he remained as such until about February of 1940; and from the time that the Nazi Government came into power in 1933 until 1945, he was a member of the Reichstag. In addition to that he held the title of Obergruppenführer in the SA. All that information appears in Document 2975-PS, which is already exhibited as Exhibit Number USA-9, and is the affidavit that he made himself.
The propaganda that he carried out throughout those years was chiefly done through the medium of his newspapers. He was the editor and publisher of the paper called Der Stürmer, which was a weekly journal, from 1922 until 1933; and thereafter the publisher and owner of the paper.
In 1933 he also founded and thereafter, I think, published—certainly was responsible for—the daily newspaper called the Fränkische Tageszeitung.
There were, in addition to that and particularly later, several others, mostly local journals, that he published from Nuremberg.