Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (44 page)

declared race, instead of economics or geography or politics, to be the decisive factor in history, and the Nordics to be the most creative and illustrious of the planet’s inhabitants—[this] had been eagerly seized upon by German writers like Wilhelm Marr, who seems to have invented the term “anti-Semite,” and the economist Eugen Duehring, who believed that the Jewish religion was a sign of the inferior race and monotheism a sign of the Jews’ desire to rule other people. Racists of many varieties flourished. The Social Darwinists held that above all the species must be maintained, the unfit should be sterilized, the stronger races had the right to stamp out the weaker…[and] the Germans [were the] superior people.
¹¹

Streicher’s hatred of “race mixing,” though, went far beyond the simple rejection of a behaviour or a people. It was translated into, not just words, but inhuman actions. For example, he repeatedly forced Aryan women who had been too friendly with Jews or even half-Jews,

to parade the streets with large sandwich-boards. On these appear the words, “I [then follows her full name] have given myself to [here is given the man’s full name], a Jewish hog.” In July 1933, in Nuremberg, Streicher had a nineteen-year-old Catholic girl arrested because she had fallen in love with a Jew, and Streicher scented “culpable relations.” The girl’s head was shaved bare, and she was compelled by the S.A. to trail the Nuremberg theaters and cabarets, accompanied by her Jewish lover. Wherever they were both dragged on to the stage, the S.A., on Streicher’s orders, explained, by obscene commentary and action, the crime that these two young people, honestly in love with each other, had been guilty of.
¹²

Streicher’s own private sex life was scandalous in spite of the fact that he was described by some Nazis as an unattractive bombastic man lacking in character. He reportedly attempted to seduce even the wives of his friends. He also told a graduating class of high school girls, it “is your duty to bear sons for the fatherland. Have them in wedlock if possible, out of wedlock if necessary. The state will look after them.”
¹³

Streicher’s father was a schoolteacher, an occupation he also followed. Julius began his anti-Semitic activities as early as 1919 and founded
Der Stürmer
in May 1923. Called pornographic, his paper became an instant hit, and was sold to both Christian and Jewish homes. His independence and rash ways caused even some fellow Nazis to call him a “dung heap” and to write about Streicher, “
Du bist ja ein Narr
”— “You’re a fool, yes, you are.”
¹⁴

A LEADING AND INFLUENTIAL NAZI

No minor Nazi, it was Streicher who was able to keep the party going after Hitler’s failed 1923 putsch. It was also Streicher who lavishly supplied Hitler with money in the early days to support his political work. In 1935 Streicher, the man
Time Magazine
wrote had a Hitler-like mustache and was the “No. 1 Jew Baiter,” was given an assembly attended by 50,000 people to “honor Hero Streicher.”
¹⁵
The storm troopers who led the massive rally earnestly chanted the following little hymn of hate: “We must unite against the Enemy of Humanity.… We must crush those who combine everything bad.”
¹⁶
As the crowd left the rally for home they chanted “Perish the Jew! …where is the Jew? Let’s get him!”
¹⁷

STREICHER’S PUBLISHING HOUSE

Streicher established a publishing house in Nuremberg which became the leading publisher of anti-Semitic literature. He published “some of the most vile anti-Jewish passages to be recorded in modern history.”
¹⁸
One of the most well-known examples was a book titled,
The Poison Mushroom
, a collection of seventeen short stories illustrated with full colour drawings showing that the Jews were the most dangerous of all poisons. Written by schoolteacher Ernst Hiemer, the illustrations effectively conveyed a strong message about the evil Jews who were like poisonous vermin that must be destroyed or they will destroy German society and people. The book was enthusiastically introduced into the classrooms of Germany and influenced German youth to accept the Nazi belief that Jews were not just biologically inferior, but also poisonous to society.

Streicher’s claims in
Der Stürmer
were not solely for entertainment, but in the end resulted in the murder of many hundreds of Jews.
¹⁹
He “has succeeded beyond the limits of his immediate office in obtaining influence over the party.”
²⁰
Streicher also was involved in the meetings leading up to the infamous Nuremberg Laws that formally initiated the Holocaust.
²¹

His relentless war against Jews continued even after hardly any free Jews remained in Germany and “one of the mainsprings of National Socialism—the struggle against Jewry” can “be traced back primarily to Streicher’s, Hitler’s, Himmler’s and the Nazi party’s eugenic anti-Semitism that triumphed over all intellectual considerations, and was one of the chief propaganda messages of the German government.”
²²

The reasons Streicher offered for condemning the Jews—their genetic immorality, their greed and their causing Germany to lose the First World War—were recognized by many Nazis as false—in their words, “poppycock” even “poisonous agitation.”
²³
The real reasons for Streicher’s and the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, Höhne wrote, were because

the SS subscribed to the theory culled from Darwin and adapted [it] to their own purposes [namely], that a people’s valuable characteristics could be increased and improved by a process of selection. The SS racial mystics recognized only one criterion of value—the Nordic Germanic race. The political twist given to Darwin’s biological theory presented his concept of the struggle for existence in a new light. What Darwin had regarded as a law of nature, the social Darwinists wished to impose from without through measures of coercion decreed by the authoritarian State; this culminated in the belief that the superior and stronger race had the right to eliminate racially inferior beings.
²⁴

The normal “task of any State is to protect the weak, the handicapped and the minorities” but, as a result of their Darwinian beliefs, the goal of a “normal civilized State’s social policy was inverted.” In Nazi Germany the task “was to reinforce the ‘good blood’ and root out those elements of the race considered ‘bad blood’”:

The SS looked upon nations not as formed entities but, in Buchheim’s words, as “a plantation overgrown with weeds, which must be cleared by isolating the incorrigible, cutting out the “ferment of decomposition,” cultivating the worthwhile elements and allowing the sub-standard to wither.”
²⁵

Associating the idea of race and Darwinism was not original with the Nazis, but the notion of race was at the forefront of early social Darwinian ideology

As early as 1903 Wilhelm Schallmayer, the biologist, had proposed “fertility selection”; in his view, good racial characteristics could be cultivated by methods of racial selectivism, such as control or banning of marriages and sterilization of inferior members of society. This was clearly the forerunner of Himmler’s racial fantasies with his “clan oaths,” marriage permits and racial hygiene examinations. In his social-Darwinistic phraseology Himmler once said: “Unless the blood of leadership in German veins, by which alone we stand or fall, can be increased by the admixture of good blood from elsewhere, we shall never achieve world mastery.
²⁶

For all these reasons, Darwinism was critical to the development of the Nazi state. James M. Rhodes identified six major Nazi ideologies. One, which Rhodes identified as the Neo-Manichaean race cosmology, seems to fit Streicher the closest.
²⁷
This view evaluated the proportion of Aryan and “ape blood” in the individual according to Table 1.

As late as 1941, Hitler called Streicher “brilliant” and “irreplaceable,” even arguing that he “fought like a buffalo in our cause.”
²⁸
Davidson wrote that Streicher’s convictions about the baseness and wickedness of the Jews matched those of Hitler, and even went beyond the anti-Jewish regulations imposed by the Nuremberg Laws.
²⁹
Hitler, though, felt that
Der Stürmer
did not go far enough, noting that—“the Jew is baser, fiercer, [and even] more diabolical than Streicher depicted him.”
³⁰

Table 1

The Neo-Manichaean race cosmology which evaluated the proportion of Aryan and “ape blood” in the individual according to the following chart:

STREICHER THE ANTI-CATHOLIC

Streicher was also stridently anti-Catholic. One reason was because he concluded Nazi teachers often “told their pupils the truth about the Jews, whereas priests and pastors taught the same children from the Old Testament, presenting stories in which Jews were heroes.”
³¹
The public reaction by Christians to such teachings of Streicher was so vehement that “outraged Christians protested throughout Germany, and
Der Stürmer
received many letters” objecting to Streicher’s characterization of priests.
³²

One result of Streicher’s
Der Stürmer
articles was that his disciples and many Nazis stepped up their campaign against Christians. Some Christian leaders argued that Christians must understand the Old Testament to understand the Jew, an idea that Streicher condemned. Ministers were also condemned for marrying Germans and Jews—and, as occurred occasionally, the marriage of a Negro and a German Aryan was anathema.

STREICHER’S END

Streicher was one of the few high-level Nazis who remained faithful to the Führer to the very end.
³³
He was tried, found guilty and hanged for crimes against humanity by the Allied Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946. A witness to his execution wrote that Streicher, “after glancing around the room where he would die, uttered in a piercing scream: ‘Heil Hitler!’”
³⁴

His last words, directed to his executioners and as translated by the prison interpreter, were, “The Bolsheviks will hang you one day.”
³⁵
The specific reason for his execution was because of his quarter century of “speaking, writing, and preaching hatred of the Jews.” A contemporary report about “Jew-Baiter Number One”
³⁶
said:

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. …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…and constitutes a crime against humanity.
³⁷

His campaign worked—at least until reality hit the German people and Germany lost the war.

SUMMARY

Julius Streicher was a leading propagandist for racism, especially against Jews in Nazi Germany. He believed the Darwinian idea that certain races were inferior and, for the sake of the superior race, must not be allowed to reproduce with the superior race because the result would be racial degeneration. He had a major influence on the Nazi movement and Hitler as well, especially during the early part of the war. Streicher was found guilty at the Nuremberg Trials and executed by the Allies for his role in the anti-Semitism movement that led to the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes.

_______________

1
Oswald Dutch,
Hitler’s 12 Apostles
(New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1940), 154.

2
Dutch,
Hitler’s 12 Apostles
, 154.

3
Eugene Davidson,
The Trial of the Germans: An Account of the Twenty-two Defendants before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 41.