This must raise serious doubts as to whether the defendant can be proved to have agreed with the mass murders practiced on Jewry, and I leave this decision to the Tribunal. In any case, he himself refers to the fact that he had no reasonably certain knowledge of these wholesale murders until 1944, a fact corroborated by the statements of the witnesses Adele Streicher and Hiemer.

He considered the articles published in the Israelitisches Wochenblatt as propaganda and consequently did not believe them. In this connection, the fact that up to the autumn of 1943 he did not in any article express satisfaction concerning the fate of Jewry in the East is in his favor. Although he did write then on the disappearance of the Jewish reservoir in the East, there is nothing to show that he had any reliable source of information at his command. He might, therefore, very well have believed that this process of disappearance was not identical with physical annihilation but might represent the evacuation of the Jewish population assembled there to neutral countries or the territory of the Soviet Union. As no evidence has been presented to show that the defendant had received hints from any quarter in regard to the intended extermination of Jewry, he could not have conceived of such a diabolical occurrence which appears to be utterly inconceivable to the human mind. And it certainly cannot be assumed that the mental capacity of the defendant should have enabled him to foresee a solution of the Jewish question such as could only have originated in the brain of a person who was no longer in his right senses.

The defendant describes himself as a fanatic and seeker of truth. He professes to have written nothing and to have expressed nothing in his speeches which he had not taken from some authentic source and properly confirmed.

There is no doubt that he was a fanatic. The fanatic, however, is a man who is so possessed or convinced of an idea or illusion that he is not open to any other consideration, and is convinced of the correctness of his own idea and no other. A psychiatrist might regard it as a sort of mental cramp. Fanaticism of any kind is not far removed from maniacal obsession. As a rule it goes along with considerable overestimation of oneself and overevaluation of one’s own personality and its influence on the world around it.

Not one of the defendants here on trial shows such a wide discrepancy between fact and fancy as does the Defendant Streicher.

The Prosecution showed him as he appeared to the outside world. What he really was—and is—has been shown by the Trial. But only actual facts can form the basis for the judgment. Base your judgment also, Gentlemen, on the fact that the defendant in his position as Gauleiter of Franconia also showed many humane characteristics—that he had a large number of political prisoners released from concentration camps, which even caused criminal proceedings to be started against him. It should also be borne in mind that he treated the prisoners of war and the foreign laborers working on his estate very well in every respect.

Whatever the judgment against the Defendant Streicher may be, it will concern the fate of a single individual. It seems to be established, however, that the German people and this defendant were never in agreement on this essential question. The German people always disapproved of the aims of this defendant as expressed in his publications, and retained its own opinion of and attitude toward the Jews.

The Prosecution’s assumption that the tendentious articles in Der Stürmer found an echo or a ready acceptance among the German population, or even produced an attitude which would readily accept criminal measures, is herewith fully refuted.

The overwhelming majority of the German nation preserved their sound common sense and showed themselves disinclined toward all acts of violence. The nation may therefore claim to be declared free of all moral complicity in, and co-responsibility for, those crimes before the public tribunal of the world, so as to be able again to take its place in the ranks of the nations.

I leave the decision on the guilt or innocence of this defendant in the hands of the High Tribunal.