I now come to the question of whether the activity of the Defendant Streicher had a decisive influence on the men who actually carried out the orders; that is, on members of the Einsatzgruppen on the one hand, and on the execution Kommandos in the concentration camps on the other; and whether any spiritual and intellectual preparation was necessary to make these men willing to execute such measures.
In his speeches in Nikolaev, Posen, and Kharkov—which have often been mentioned here—the Reichsführer SS stated unequivocally not only that he besides Hitler was responsible for the final solution of the Jewish question, but also that the execution of the orders was only made possible by the employment of forces which he himself had selected from among the SS. We know from Ohlendorf’s testimony that the so-called Einsatzgruppen consisted of members of the Gestapo and the SD, companies of the Waffen-SS, members of the police force with long service records, and indigenous units.
It must be stated as a matter of principle that the Defendant Streicher never had the slightest influence on the ideological attitude of the SS. The extensive evidence material of this Trial contains no shadow of proof that Streicher had any connections with the SS. The alleged Enemy Number One of the Jews, the great propagandist of the persecution of the Jews—as he has been pictured by the Prosecution—the Defendant Streicher never had the opportunity of writing for the periodical Das Schwarze Korps or even for the SS Leithefte. These periodicals alone, however, as the official mouthpieces of the Reichsführer SS, determined the ideological attitude of the SS. These SS periodicals also determined their attitude toward the Jewish question. In these circles Der Stürmer had just as small a public; it was rejected, just as it was in other circles. Himmler himself rejected Streicher ironically as an ideologist. Therefore the Defendant Streicher could not have had any influence on the ideology of the SS members of the Einsatzgruppen, much less on the old members of the Police, and least of all on the foreign units. Nor could he dictate the ideology of the execution squad’s in the concentration camps. Those men originated for the most part from the Death’s Head Units, that is the old guard units, of whom the above statement is true to a greater degree. Added to this is the fact that the experienced members of the Police, as well as the SS men with long service records, were trained in absolute obedience to their leaders. Absolute obedience to a Führer command was a matter of course for both.
Even those experienced police force members, however, accustomed as they were to absolute obedience, even the veteran SS men, could not simply be charged by Himmler with carrying out the executions of the Jews. Rather did he have to select men whom he trusted to lead these execution squads and to make them personally responsible for their assignments, pointing out explicitly that he would take all responsibility and that he himself was only passing on a definite order from Hitler.
Even these men, whom the Prosecution alleges to have been the elite of Nazism, were so far from being enemies of the Jews in the meaning of the Indictment, that the entire authority of the head of State and Führer, and of his most brutal henchman, Himmler, was required to force upon the men responsible for carrying out the execution orders the conviction that their order was based on the will of the authoritarian head of the State; an order which, according to their conviction, had the power of a fundamental State law and therefore was above all criticism.
The men charged to carry out the annihilation, therefore, obeyed their orders not for ideological reasons and not because they were incited to do so by Streicher, as the Prosecution contends, but solely in obedience to an order from Hitler transmitted to them through Himmler, and knowing that disobedience to a Führer order meant death. In this respect, too, therefore, Streicher’s influence has not been proved.
The accusations brought against the defendant by the Prosecution are herewith exhausted. But, in order to reach a conclusion and to form a judgment of the defendant which will take the actual findings fully into account, it seems advisable to give once more a short account of his personality and his activities under the Hitler regime.
The Prosecution considers him to be the leading anti-Semite and the leading advocate of a ruthless determination to annihilate Jewry. This conception, however, does justice neither to the part played by the defendant and the influence actually exercised by him, nor to his personality. The manner of the defendant’s employment in the Third Reich and the way in which he was called upon to co-operate in the propagation and final solution of the Jewish question shows the Prosecution’s conception to be false. The only occasion on which the defendant was called upon to take an active part in the fight against Jewry was in his capacity as chairman of the Action Committee for the Anti-Jewish Boycott Day on 1 April 1933. His attitude on that day is in direct opposition to his violent utterances in Der Stürmer and makes it evident that the passages in his paper which have been attacked were pure propaganda. Although on that day he could have drawn upon the whole power of State and Party against Jewry, he was content to order that Jewish places of business be marked as such and put under guard. In addition, he gave explicit instructions that any molestation of the Jews or acts of violence, or any damage to Jewish property, was forbidden and would be punished. In the later stages no further use at all was made of the defendant. He was not even consulted on the ideological basis for the settlement of the Jewish question. He was unable to voice his ideas in the press or over the air. He was not asked to write on the clarification of the Jewish question either in the Schulungsbriefe of the Party or the periodicals belonging to the organizations.
Not he but the Defendant Rosenberg was charged by Hitler with the ideological training of the German people. The latter was responsible for the Institute for Research into the Jewish Question, set up in Frankfurt, and not the Defendant Streicher; in fact, the latter was not even considered as a collaborator in this institute. The Defendant Rosenberg was commissioned with the arrangement of an Anti-Jewish World Congress in 1944. It is true that this assembly did not take place, but it is significant that the plans made for it did not include the participation of the Defendant Streicher.
The whole of the anti-Jewish laws and decrees of the Third Reich were drafted without his participation. He was not even called in to draft the racial laws proclaimed at the Party rally in Nuremberg in 1935. The Defendant Streicher did not take part in a single conference on even moderately important questions in either peace or wartime. His name does not appear on any list of participants or on any minutes. Not even in the course of the discussions themselves is one single reference made to his name.