| Communication Arts & Sciences |
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Faculty - Publication by Randall Bytwerk | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NOTE: This is a slightly edited version Chapter 3 of Randall Bytwerk's
book Julius Streicher, 2nd ed (New York: Cooper Square, 2001).
I do not guarantee the complete accuracy of the HTML translation. This
chapter provides a brief history of the newspaper. The other chapters
of the book discuss Streicher's career and the various ways in which he
promoted anti-Semitism. The
book is available from amazon.com. Der Stürmer:
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| Issue/Year | Circulation |
| 1927 | 14,000 |
| 1933 | 25,000 |
| No. 6 (1934) | 47,000 |
| No.13 (1934) | 49,000 |
| No. 17 (1934) | 50,000 |
| No. 19 (1934) | 60,000 |
| No. 33 (1934) | 80,000 |
| No. 35 (1934) | 94,114 |
| No. 42 (1934) | 113,800 |
| No. 6 (1935) | 132,897 |
| No. 19 (1935) | 202,600 |
| No. 29 (1935) | 286,400 |
| No. 36 (1935) | 410,600 |
| No. 40 (1935) | 486,000 |
| No. 5 (1938) | 473,000 |
The circulation growth after 1934 was assisted by enthusiastic promotion. Robert Ley, the Nazi labor leader, pushed the Stürmer on his membership. Various party affiliates conducted circulation drives. In 1937, for example, a Nazi district farmer's organization leader wrote his subordinates ordering them to attend to the Stürmer when conducting anti-Jewish agitation. "No education material is better there than the old anti-Semitic fighting paper of the Gauleiter of Franconia, Julius Streicher, the Stürmer. With blunt plainness he reveals the crimes of the Jewish race from the beginning to the present." (9) All subordinates were to subscribe, and were to inform him that they had done so. No excuses would be accepted.
Nine special editions also were published after 1933, often timed to appear at the annual Nuremberg rally. These had themes such as ritual murder, Jewish criminality, the world Jewish conspiracy, Jewish sex crimes, and the Jews of Austria and Czechoslovakia. Print runs were as high as 2,000,000, and extensive national advertising was conducted.
The readership of the Stürmer was even larger than the circulation figures suggest, for thousands of elaborate display cases were built by loyal readers throughout Germany that displayed each week's issue. A journalism handbook published during the Nazi era claimed that such display cases were to be found everywhere in Germany, giving the paper an unprecedented readership. These cases, built in areas where many people passed by, were often elaborate structures. Usually they were graced with slogans from the Stürmer such as "The Jews are our misfortune" or "German. women and girls: The Jews are your destruction." The Stürmer regularly urged readers to keep the display cases well maintained and uncluttered. A 1936 notice to readers, for example, instructed readers to keep only the latest issue of the newspaper and Stürmer publishing house literature on display. "It is especially important that Stürmer display cases do not adversely affect the local scenery." (10) Many issues of the paper carried photographs of particularly impressive display cases, and most issues in the 1930s carried long lists of newly erected ones .
Showcases were built in places where people naturally congregated--bus stops, factory canteens, public squares, parks, and busy streets. A passerby could, within a few seconds, pause to see the latest Fips cartoon, or devote the several minutes necessary to read any of the generally brief articles. The showcases became part of everyday life in the Third Reich.
The enormous circulation of the Stürmer was in itself evidence of its official popularity, but there was more. Adolf Hitler himself praised it. Hermann Rauschning, summarizing a conversation with Hitler, reports the Führer's admiration for Streicher's work:
Anti-Semitism ... was beyond question the most important weapon in his propagandist arsenal, and almost everywhere it was of deadly efficiency. That was why he had allowed Streicher, for example, a free hand. The man's stuff, too, was amusing, and very cleverly done. Wherever, he wondered, did Streicher get his constant supply of new material? He, Hitler, was simply on thorns to see each new issue of the Stürmer. It was the one periodical that he always read with pleasure, from the first page to the last. (11)
Streicher regularly cited Hitler's praise, which does not have to be strictly true, of course. But the fact that Hitler was willing to make such a statement gave the Stürmer considerable force.
Other leading figures of the party wrote letters praising the Stürmer, apparently in response to a request from the paper. Victor Lutze, chief of the Storm Troopers, wrote in 1937: "The Stürmer has an essential role in seeing that each German today views the Jewish question as the crucial question of the nation, and the honor of having put racial thought in popular language." Albert Forster, Gauleiter of Danzig, wrote:
With pleasure I say that the Stürmer, more than any other daily or weekly newspaper, has made clear to the people in simple ways the danger of Jewry.
Without Julius Streicher and his Stürmer, the importance of a solution to the Jewish question would not be seen to be as critical as it actually is by many citizens.
It is therefore to be hoped that those who want to learn the unvarnished truth about the Jewish question will read the Stürmer. (12)
Similar letters came from Heinrich Himmler, Robert Ley, Max Amann, and other prominent Nazis.
The success of the Stürmer allowed Streicher to broaden his activity by publishing anti-Semitic books. Two garishly illustrated children's readers were published after 1936, along with a third storybook with lurid tales comparing Jews to unpleasant animals. His early speeches and editorials were published in collections edited by Heinz Preiss. Streicher's collaborator Fritz Fink wrote a guide to anti-Semitic education, copies of which were conveniently available in Braille. A series of pseudoscholarly works appeared, including a study of court Jews, a collection of anti-Jewish proverbs, and a brief work on Bismarck's treaty with Russia. Streicher also produced a series of illustrated books on the Nuremberg rallies and even put out a short-lived anti-Semitic medical journal.
Another major project was the Stürmer archives first mentioned in 1933. This grew to a sizable collection of anti-Semitica, including thousands of books in Hebrew and Aramaic (languages few staff members could read) and many more in German and other languages. There were many Jewish and Gentile periodicals and a large collection of Fips cartoons and photographs, along with assorted Jewish paraphernalia such as Torah scrolls and the tools of ritual circumcisers. The most notorious part of the collection was its large holding of pornography, which Streicher claimed was for scientific research into the Jewish question.
Much of the material was sent in by readers, to whom the paper often appealed for such items; more came from seized Jewish property. The Gestapo supplied considerable information, particularly on the theme of Jewish criminality. The Gestapo was usually cooperative, but when some offices were recalcitrant Streicher complained and as usual got action. A 1937 Gestapo memo instructs local offices to turn over to the Stürmer whatever it requested. And a 1940 Stürmer letter to the Düsseldorf Gestapo office asked particularly for material relevant to Jews and pornography, requesting all pornography in any way connected with Jews--if Jews had written, printed, published, or sold it, the Stürmer wanted it. (13)
Over three hundred people worked for Streicher by 1939, including, remarkably enough, a Jew named Jonas Wolk, who under the pen name Fritz Brand wrote particularly dreadful Stürmer articles The Göring report noted that, while Streicher paid Wolk a good salary, he refused to shake hands with him. A 1939 letter from Vienna came from a Jew who also wanted to have his material printed by the Stürmer. (14) The bulk of the staff, of less puzzling background, helped Streicher conduct an operation that reached the entire German speaking world. Copies went to the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, and other countries with large German populations. The world press regularly reported Streicher's doings, viewing him as a major force in Nazi Jew-baiting.
In Germany, even though the Stürmer lacked status as an official party paper, it had semi-official status. As a Berlin court that rejected the suit of the victim of a Stürmer article stated:
The Stürmer has the task of spreading and deepening the understanding of racial matters among the people, as well as supporting the movement in its vital struggle against international Jewry. Thus it is quite proper for the Stürmer and others to be critical of the relationships between individual citizens and the Jews. This is done not to slander the individual, rather to show the whole of Germany how each individual conducts himself with respect to Jewry. The individual has no right to complain about such criticism of his behavior, as long as it is reported objectively, since that would unreasonably hamper or even endanger the necessary work of the Stürmer. (15)
Elsewhere in Germany, citizens were arrested for criticizing Streicher or disparaging his Stürmer.
As such a court case suggests, however, even the official anti-Semitism of the Third Reich failed to make Streicher's work popular with many Germans. All sorts of protests from German citizens occurred. The most common involved the sexual element in many Stürmer stories. Editor Ernst Hiemer responded vehemently to such complaints: "You may survey the entire thirteen volumes of the Stürmer and note every passage which you think endangers the youth. But we will then take the holy books and do the same." It was better to have a youth educated in the sexual threat of Jewry than one ruined through ignorance. A later issue spoke of "perfumed women with delicate nerves and men of trmer regularly attacked its critics. One Fritz Eckart earned space in the paper in 1936, for example, when he walked into his barber shop only to leave when he found a copy of the Stürmer on display. Thereafter he would say: "I am a Center Party man and will remain so, come what May." (17) The sixty businessmen in another town who attended a Jewish funeral were attacked, without, however, suffering adverse consequences.
Even leading Nazis sometimes worked up the courage to attack Streicher and the Stürmer. Otto Dietrich, the press secretary, tried to persuade Hitler to ban the Stürmer on several occasions, only to have Hitler respond that Streicher's "primitive methods" were most valuable in reaching the average man. Hans Lammers, Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and a number of other top party figures also tried to do something about Streicher at one time or another, with the most limited success. (18)
When Streicher did get into trouble, he could always turn to Hitler for help. In 1934, for example, the ritual murder special edition produced international uproar, including protests from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Hitler finally permitted it to be banned, only after most copies had already been distributed, on the pretext that Streicher's comparison of the Christian sacrament of communion to Jewish ritual murder was an affront to Christians. Later that year, the Stürmer's ill-advised attack on a Czechoslovakian statesman got in the way of German diplomacy, resulting in a two-week ban. In 1935 the paper attacked Hans Lammers, and a three-month ban was imposed. But Streicher visited Hitler and secured his order allowing him to resume publication. Hitler revoked another ban in 1938, once again after Streicher made a personal appeal.
By 1940 such difficulties had lessened. With the general tightening of censorship that accompanied the war, proofs of each Stürmer issue were sent to Berlin before publication. In November 1940, for example, the censor instructed the paper to hold back an article on Jews in Turkey, to omit an article on Switzerland, and to alter parts of other stories. (19) These changes were not critical of the anti-Jewish tone--the worst stories passed untouched--but attempts to avoid diplomatic difficulties.
After 1940 the Stürmer's circulation dropped sharply, in part due to war time paper shortages, though Hitler assured enough paper for Streicher to keep going. A more important reason was the disappearance of Jews from everyday life within Germany. In the 1920s and 1930s each issue of the paper had been filled with charges that Jews were about nefarious deeds everywhere in Germany, posing an immediate threat to each reader. But by the war years, most Jews who had not emigrated had been removed to the East, where under the ministrations of the SS and out of public view, they were annihilated in growing numbers. Lacking the element of immediate threat, large numbers of Germans lost whatever interest they had had in the Jewish question. The Stürmer was left a journal of international affairs, not the scandal sheet that had made it notorious. Without the appeal of immediate scandal, the circulation soon dropped to under two hundred thousand. By mid-1944, paper shortages had reduced it from its high of sixteen pages to the four pages it had had in 1923. Yet Streicher continued to the end, his final issue appearing in February 1945. Denouncing the invading Allies as tools of the international Jewish conspiracy, the issue had a limited audience.
The Stürmer was published for twenty-two years. Never before or since was there a newspaper that so crudely proclaimed racial hatred to so many people. Even today, the Stürmer's message is available in anti-Semitic literature published the world over. Indeed, in 1976 the New Christian Crusade Church, a very right-wing organization in Louisiana, printed "The Julius Streicher Memorial Edition" of the 1934 ritual murder special edition (see figure 16). According to the introductory material: "Julius Streicher, German educator, writer, and politician, in whose memory this paper was printed, was a victim of the horrible Talmudic Blood Rite known as the Nuremberg Trials.... We now proudly present to you, the reader, for the first time in English, this new edition of Julius Stricher's (sic] most famous issue of Der Sturmer." The English-language version has, apparently, sold well.
1. The story is in a manuscript version of Heinz Preiss's dissertation in the Hauptarchiv der NSDAP, Hoover Institution microfilm edition, reel 98, folder AL 18. The final version of Preiss's dissertation omits the story.
2. Amann to Streicher, August 16, 1923, Nachlass Streicher (NS) 105, Bundesarchiv Koblenz.
3. Nürnberger Zeitung, November 8, 1925. A clipping is in the HA, 17A/1731.
4. The undated circular is in NS 71.
5. Nuremberg Police to State's Attorney, December 12, 1927, HA, 85/1732.
6. Hitler's Table Talk, pp. 31-32.
7. Preiss, p. 79.
8. Der Stürmer, No. 17 (1935).
9. Wolfgang Sauer, ed., Dokumente über die Verfolgung der jüdischen Bürger in Baden-Württemberg durch das nationalsozialistische Regime 1933-1945, Vol. 1 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1966), p. 103.
10. Der Stürmer, No. 5 (1936).
11. Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London: Thornton Buttersworth, 1939), pp. 233-34.
12. Der Stürmer, No. 11 (1939) and No. 27 (1937).
13. See the September 4, 1937 Gestapo memo in the HA, 91/1891, and DS to Düsseldorf Gestapo, September 2, 1940, in the Wiener Library Collection, VB 5, Nazi Anti-Semitic Propaganda at Home.
14. Horowitz to DS, February 5, 1939, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, Stürmerarchiv, folder 1,681.
15. Der Stümer, No. 41 (1937).
16. Der Stürmer, No. 47 (1935). Various complaints from doctors are found in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Reichskanzlei file R 43 II. One attacks Streicher for sugesting insulin was part of the Jewish plot.
17. Der Stürmer, No. 3 (1936).
18. See Edward N. Peterson, The Limits of Hitler's Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 230. for a discussion of Lammers's difficulties.
19. Fred Hahn, Lieber Stürmer! Leserbriefe an das NS-Kampfblatt 1924 bis 1945 (Stuttgart: Seewald Verlag, 1978), p. 105.
Go to a full listing of Randall Bytwerk's publications.
[Copyright © 1983 by Randall Bytwerk]
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