Excerpts from Julius Streicher's final statement prior to sentencing:
"The prosecution had asserted that mass killings [of Jews] could not have been possible without Streicher and his Sturmer. The prosecution neither offered nor submitted any proof of this assertion. . . .
These actions of the leader of the State [Hitler] against the Jews can be explained by the attitude toward the Jewish question, which was thoroughly different from mine. Hitler wanted to punish the Jews because he held them responsible for unleashing the war and for the bombing of the German population. . . . I repudiate the mass killings . . . in the same way as they are repudiated by every decent German.
Your Honors! Neither in my capacity as Gauleiter nor as political author have I committed a crime, and I therefore look forward to your judgment with a good conscience.
I have no request to make for myself. I have one for the German people from whom I come. Your Honors, fate has given you the power to pronounce any judgment. Do not pronounce a judgment which would imprint the stamp of dishonor upon the forehead of an entire nation."
Some previous quotes from Julius Streicher from before and during the war:
From articles in his newspaper, Der Sturmer.
"The continued work of Der Sturmer will help to ensure that every German down to the last man will, with heart and hand, join the ranks of those whose aim it is to crush the head of the serpent Pan-Juda [the Jewish people] beneath their heels. He who helps bring this about helps to eliminate the devil, and the devil is the Jew."
"The Jewish people ought to be exterminated root and branch. Then the plague of pests would have disappeared in Poland also at one stroke." September, 1939
"At the end of this Jewish war the extermination of the Jewish people will have been brought about." February, 1940
"The Jew is a devil in human form. It is fitting that he be exterminated root and branch." March, 1940
"The Jewish rabble will be exterminated like the weeds and vermin so that it can never again disturb the bloodily fought for peace of the European peoples." November, 1940
From a speech delivered by Julius Streicher on April 1, 1933.
"Never since the beginning of the world and the creation of man has there been a nation which dared to fight against the nation of blood-suckers and extortioners who, for a thousand years, have spread all over the world. . . . It was left to our Movement [the Nazis] to expose the Jew as a mass murderer. . . . As long as I stand at the head of the struggle, this struggle will be conducted so honestly that the eternal Jew will derive no joy from it."
Excerpts from the judgment of the International Military Tribunal against Julius Streicher:
"For his 25 years of speaking, writing, and preaching hatred of the Jews, Streicher was widely known as 'Jew-Baiter Number 1.' In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism, and incited the German people to active persecution. . . . But it was not only in Germany that this defendant advocated his doctrines. As early as 1938 he began to call for the extermination of the Jewish race. . . . With knowledge of the extermination of the Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories, this defendant continued to write and publish his propaganda of death. . . . 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, as defined by the Charter, and constitutes a crime against humanity."
