Julius Streicher was hanged in the early hours of October 16, 1946. But his death did not end the shadow he had cast over postwar Germany. His widow Adele and his two sons, Lothar and Elmar, remained tied to one of the most despised figures of the Third Reich, long after the last Nazi flag had fallen. When the gallows trap door opened beneath Streicher’s feet in that Nuremberg gymnasium, it closed one chapter of infamy, but opened another for the family he left behind.
They faced a world that now associated their name with the most virulent anti-Semitism in modern history. What followed were decades of obscurity, complicity denied, and lives lived under the burden of a legacy many wish to forget, but few could escape. Julius Streicher had been, in the words of Nuremberg prosecutors, “Jew-baiter number one. ” Born on February 12, 1885, in Fleinhausen, Bavaria, he came from modest origins as one of nine children of a village school teacher.
Following in his father’s footsteps, he became an elementary school teacher himself, settling in Nuremberg in 1909. His marriage to Kunigunde Roth, a baker’s daughter, in 1913, produced two sons: Lothar, born on January 2, 1915, and Elmar, born on March 16, 1918. Streicher’s service in the First World War earned him the Iron Cross first and second class. But the defeat of Germany and the turmoil of the Weimar Republic transformed him into something far more dangerous than a decorated soldier.
By 1919, something had turned him into what historians describe as a radical anti-Semite, though the precise catalyst remains unknown. Streicher’s path to infamy began when he heard Adolf Hitler speak in Munich in 1922. The experience, by his own account, was transformative. “It was on a winter’s day,” Streicher later recalled.
“I sat unknown in the large hall. Suspense was in the air. Everyone seemed tense with excitement. Then, suddenly, a shout, ‘Hitler is coming.
‘ Thousands jumped to their feet. And when he finally finished, I rushed to the stage. ” He joined the Nazi Party in October 1922 and in May 1923 founded Der Stürmer, a newspaper that would become synonymous with the most vulgar and pornographic anti-Semitic propaganda imaginable. That same year, Streicher marched alongside Hitler in the front row of the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, braving the bullets of the police.
His loyalty during this early crisis earned him Hitler’s lifelong protection, a protection that would save him from his own party’s attempts to remove him years later. Unlike other Nazi publications that cloaked their hatred in pseudoscientific language, Der Stürmer made no pretense of sophistication. Its pages featured crude caricatures of Jews with exaggerated features drawn by Philipp Rupprecht under the pen name Fips, lurid allegations of ritual murder, and semi-pornographic stories about Jewish men supposedly defiling German women. The newspaper’s masthead carried the slogan “Die Juden sind unser Unglück” — “The Jews are our misfortune.
” Hitler declared it his favorite newspaper, and at its peak in 1935, Der Stürmer reached a circulation of 600,000 copies weekly. Special glass-enclosed display cases called Stürmerkästen were erected throughout Germany so that passersby could read the latest issue in town squares, train stations, and busy streets across the Reich. The publishing house expanded beyond the weekly newspaper. In 1936, Streicher published “Trau keinem Fuchs auf grüner Heid und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid” — “Trust no fox on a green heath and no Jew upon his oath.
” An illustrated children’s book created by 18-year-old Elvira Bauer. The book depicted Jews as devils and child predators while portraying Streicher himself as a hero to German children. Two years later came “Der Giftpilz” — “The Poisonous Mushroom” — which used the metaphor of attractive but deadly mushrooms to teach children to identify and fear Jews. These books were distributed to schools throughout Germany, ensuring that hatred was instilled in the youngest generation.
The wealth generated by Der Stürmer was considerable. Streicher became a multi-millionaire, acquiring properties throughout Nuremberg and the surrounding region. As Gauleiter of Franconia from 1925 to 1940, he wielded enormous power over the region. His enemies called him “the King of Nuremberg” and “the Beast of Franconia,” while his supporters dubbed him the “Frankenführer.
” Nuremberg, the medieval city that had been a center of German culture for centuries, became his personal fief. He organized the boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, served as chairman of the Central Committee to Combat the Jewish Atrocity and Boycott Campaign, and advocated for the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. In 1938, he ordered the destruction of the great synagogue of Nuremberg, a magnificent structure built in 1874. He claimed his decision was based on his disapproval of its architecture, a transparent lie that fooled no one.
In December 1936, he purchased an 82-hectare estate called the Pleitenhof near Cadolzburg for 205,000 Reichsmarks. The cost of renovating and expanding the property exceeded 1. 3 million Reichsmarks, a sum that provoked whispers even among loyal Nazis. The locals noted that the pig paddock at Pleitenhof cost more than the homes of ordinary Germans.
Much of this wealth came from what the Nazis called “Aryanization,” the legalized theft of Jewish property. Streicher used his position as Gauleiter of Franconia to acquire at least 13 houses in Nuremberg alone, often through shell companies that obscured the transactions. His fall from political grace began in 1938 when his erratic behavior and corruption became too much even for the Nazi hierarchy to tolerate. Streicher had publicly spread false rumors that Hermann Göring was impotent and that Göring’s daughter Edda had been conceived through artificial insemination.
Göring, enraged, demanded that Hitler act. An investigation by a Nazi Party tribunal documented not only financial irregularities, but also Streicher’s well-known habit of striding through Nuremberg streets cracking a bullwhip and his sadistic pleasure in personally beating political prisoners. In February 1940, Streicher was stripped of his position as Gauleiter and banished to the Pleitenhof, forbidden from entering Nuremberg itself. Hitler, however, retained a strange loyalty to his old comrade.
Streicher was allowed to keep his title, wear the uniform, and, most importantly, continue publishing Der Stürmer until the final weeks of the war. Kunigunde Streicher, his first wife and mother of his sons, died in 1943 after 30 years of marriage. Her death marked the end of any semblance of normal family life for the Streicher household. In the final chaotic months of the Reich, as American forces drove through Bavaria, Streicher made a decision that surprised many who knew him.
Rather than committing suicide, as he later claimed he had planned, he married his secretary, Adele Tapp, in April 1945. The marriage occurred just days before Germany’s surrender on May 7, 1945. They had intended, according to Adele’s later testimony, to die together in the defense of Nuremberg, a defense that never materialized. The capture of Julius Streicher came with an irony that seemed almost scripted.
On May 23, 1945, a jeep carrying American officers from the 101st Airborne Division pulled up to a farmhouse in Waidring, Austria, near Berchtesgaden. Leading the group was Major Henry Plitt, a Jewish officer from New York who had been among the first American soldiers to touch French soil on D-Day, jumping into Normandy at 02:00 on June 6, 1944. He had been wounded four times during the war and decorated with two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars, four Purple Hearts, and the French Croix de Guerre. Before the war, Plitt had been a lawyer, but after hearing stories from refugee relatives about Jewish persecution in Germany, he had enlisted with a single purpose in mind.
“One man was responsible for all this, and his name was Hitler. Somehow or other, I just wanted to kill him. ” After Germany’s surrender, Plitt volunteered for duty hunting Nazi fugitives. He had already helped capture Robert Ley, the head of the German Labor Front, and Carl Oberg, known as the “Butcher of Paris.
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That May afternoon, acting on a tip about a high-ranking Nazi in the area, Plitt approached a bearded man who claimed to be an artist named Joseph Sailer, interested only in painting the Alpine scenery. Plitt’s knowledge of German was limited, but he spoke enough to remark that the man resembled Julius Streicher, whose photograph he had recently seen. Misunderstanding Plitt’s halting German, Streicher believed he had been recognized and blurted out, “Ja, bin ich — yes, that’s me. ” The most notorious Jew-baiter in Nazi Germany had been captured by a Jewish American officer who had barely said his name.
As Plitt drove Streicher back to headquarters in his jeep, he held his pistol against the prisoner’s ribs to prevent any escape or suicide attempt. Upon arrival, as Streicher stepped out of the vehicle, Plitt gave him a kick to accelerate his departure. The Nuremberg trial brought Julius Streicher face to face with justice in the very city he had terrorized for nearly two decades. Unlike other defendants who attempted to distance themselves from the regime’s crimes, Streicher remained defiant.
He claimed throughout the proceedings that all his judges were Jewish. When psychiatric examiners administered the Wechsler-Bellevue IQ test, Streicher scored 106, above average for the general population, but the lowest among the Nuremberg defendants. Some observers believed he was mentally unbalanced. His behavior during the trial alternated between ranting speeches against Jews, the Allies, and the court itself, and periods of theatrical sulking.
He frequently had to be silenced by court officers. When prosecutors presented the evidence — 25 years of speeches, articles, and children’s books calling for the extermination of the Jewish people — Streicher showed no remorse. In an August 1941 article, he had written, “If the danger of the reproduction of that curse of God in the Jewish blood is finally to come to an end, then there is only one way, the extermination of that people whose father is the devil. ” The prosecution demonstrated that Streicher had continued publishing such incitement even after he was aware that the extermination was actually taking place.
His low IQ score did nothing to diminish his venom. Fellow defendants avoided him. Even those accused of the most horrific crimes found his company intolerable. Hermann Göring, who despised Streicher for the rumors about his daughter, later claimed he forbade his own staff from reading Der Stürmer.
Adele Streicher’s appearance in courtroom 600 as a defense witness created a sensation. Observers wondered what kind of woman would marry Julius Streicher in the final days of the Reich. Dressed in a long red velvet dress, she testified that her husband had treated foreign workers at the Pleitenhof humanely and that she had known nothing of the Holocaust until 1944, when they learned of it through Swiss newspapers. Prosecutors did not bother to cross-examine her.
The evidence against her husband was overwhelming without anything she might say in his defense. During her interrogation, Adele revealed that in March 1945, as American troops approached, she and Streicher had burned bundles of documents, correspondence, and journals that might have further incriminated him. The verdict came on October 1, 1946. Streicher was acquitted of crimes against peace — there was no evidence he had played any role in planning the war — but was found guilty of crimes against humanity.
The tribunal’s judgment stated that for 25 years, Streicher had infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism and incited the German people to active persecution. The judges concluded that his 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. He was the first person in history held accountable by an international tribunal for what would later be called incitement to genocide. His execution was set for October 16, 1946.
In the two weeks between the verdict and the execution, Streicher remained in his cell at Nuremberg prison, reportedly spending his final days reading. His sons visited him during this period. A British Pathé photograph from September 30, 1946, captured Elmar arriving at the prison to see his father one last time. What passed between them in those final meetings remains unknown.
For their last meal on October 15, the condemned men, including Streicher, were served sausage and cold cuts along with potato salad and black bread with tea to drink. Hermann Göring cheated the hangman by swallowing cyanide that evening, but Streicher had no such escape planned. The hanging of Julius Streicher was the most dramatic of the ten executions carried out that night. Journalist Kingsbury Smith of the International News Service, chosen by lot to represent the American press, recorded every detail.
At 2:12 a. m. , guards brought Streicher to the gymnasium that had been converted into an execution chamber — the same gymnasium American soldiers had used for basketball just three days earlier. Three black-painted scaffolds stood ready.
Streicher, described as an ugly, dwarfish little man wearing a threadbare suit and bluish shirt buttoned to the neck, glanced at the gallows and then at the witnesses. At the bottom of the scaffold, he screamed, “Heil Hitler! ” — the only defendant to invoke the Führer’s name in his final moments. As he reached the platform, he shouted, “Now it goes to God,” followed by “Purimfest, 1946,” a reference to the Jewish holiday commemorating the execution of Haman, the ancient Persian persecutor of the Jews.
His final words before the black hood covered his head were, “The Bolsheviks will hang you one day,” and, almost inaudibly, “Adele, meine liebe — Adele, my dear wife. ”
Eyewitnesses agreed that Streicher did not receive a quick death. Unlike the other executions where spinal severance brought near-instantaneous unconsciousness, Streicher continued groaning after the trap door opened. The hangman, Master Sergeant John C.
Woods, descended beneath the scaffold and disappeared behind the black canvas curtain. The groaning stopped. Smith later wrote that the consensus among witnesses was that Streicher had strangled slowly and that Woods had been forced to pull down on the swinging body to end his suffering. Streicher’s corpse, like those of the other executed Nazis, was cremated in Munich.
The ashes were scattered in the Isar River to prevent any memorial or place of pilgrimage. For Adele Streicher, the execution of her husband ended her brief public visibility. After taking the witness stand in April 1946 and appearing in the courtroom during the trial, she disappeared from the historical record almost entirely. Unlike the widows of other prominent Nazis — Emmy Göring, who wrote memoirs and gave interviews, or Lina Heydrich, who defended her husband until her death — Adele Streicher receded into complete obscurity.
No memoirs, no interviews, no public statement survive. Whether she returned to her maiden name of Tapp, whether she remained in Germany or immigrated, whether she lived for decades or died shortly after the war, none of this is known with certainty. She became, in effect, a footnote to a footnote in history. The fate of Streicher’s sons presents a more complex picture.
Both Lothar and Elmar had grown up immersed in their father’s world of hatred. According to sources cited by historians and researchers, their childhood was marked by their father’s notorious behavior. One academic study noted that Streicher proved to be a miserable father and a brutal husband who regularly humiliated his family with his serial infidelity. The boys grew up in a household dominated by their father’s obsession with anti-Semitism, surrounded by the crude propaganda that made the family wealthy.
Historical records indicate that Lothar, the elder son, joined the SS while still a schoolboy. He later became a columnist for Der Stürmer itself, contributing to the same anti-Semitic propaganda that would send his father to the gallows. During the war, he trained as a pilot in the Luftwaffe while simultaneously undertaking special missions for his father, gathering intelligence about anti-Nazi activities and reporting back to Streicher. His diary, excerpts of which were used as evidence at Nuremberg, revealed the depth of his indoctrination.
On July 16, 1941, Lothar recorded a visit to the Zamość ghetto in occupied Poland. After describing the poverty, suffering, and filth he witnessed, he wrote the words that would later be quoted in newspaper accounts of his father’s trial: “There is only one solution to the Jewish problem: extermination. ” Lothar also contributed as a columnist to Der Stürmer, continuing the family tradition of anti-Semitic propaganda. His involvement in his father’s work placed him squarely within the apparatus of Nazi persecution.
Yet unlike his father, Lothar was not among those tried at Nuremberg or in subsequent war crimes proceedings. The exact circumstances of his postwar life remain murky. What is known is that in 1995, 50 years after the war’s end, German documentary filmmakers located Lothar Streicher and convinced him to participate in a film about his father. The resulting documentary, which included interviews with Lothar, family servants, and observers of the Nuremberg trial, offered a rare glimpse into the Streicher family’s perspective.
Lothar shared private family photographs and spoke about his father’s life, though the content of his remarks — whether defensive, remorseful, or somewhere in between — is not widely documented in English-language sources. The youngest son, Elmar, took a different path during the war, though details of his service remain fragmentary. Photographs from September 1946, published by British Pathé, show Elmar visiting his father in prison at Nuremberg during the trial. The image of a son confronting his father on the eve of execution raises questions that historical sources cannot fully answer.
What did they say to each other? Did Elmar understand the magnitude of his father’s crimes, or did he remain loyal to the family’s ideology? One forum dedicated to Axis military history notes that a photograph of Elmar appears in Ingeborg Kalnoky’s memoir, “The Guest House,” which documented the Nuremberg trials from the perspective of those who housed and fed the witnesses. He is described as bearing a strong resemblance to his father.
After the war, both sons appear to have retreated from public life. Unlike some children of Nazi leaders who publicly repudiated their parents’ actions or, conversely, founded neo-Nazi movements, the Streicher sons chose obscurity. Daniel Roos’s 2014 dissertation at the University of Würzburg, later published as “Julius Streicher und Der Stürmer 1923–1945,” drew on information provided by Lothar over the years, suggesting some level of ongoing engagement with researchers interested in his father’s history. But neither son became a public figure in the manner of Niklas Frank, who wrote scathing accounts of his father, the executed Nazi governor of Poland, or Wolf Rüdiger Hess, who spent decades campaigning for his father’s release from Spandau prison.
One detail captures the macabre nature of the situation. When the Jews took over the farm, they discovered signs that Streicher had left behind, including one that read, “Without a solution to the Jewish question, there is no solution to the world question. ” The Americans had left the property essentially as Streicher had left it, complete with copies of Der Stürmer and Mein Kampf. The survivors chose not to remove the signs.
Instead, they lived amid the remnants of their persecutor’s ideology while preparing for a new life. The first child born at Kibbutz Neve arrived on November 9, 1945, the seventh anniversary of Kristallnacht. Her parents named her Nechama Ruchama Madzinski. She would later preserve her family’s photographic collection of life at the kibbutz, which is now held by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Kibbutz Neve operated for approximately three years. By the end of 1948, when the state of Israel was established and mass immigration became possible, most of the roughly 150 residents had left for the new Jewish homeland. Some stayed briefly in nearby Fürth and joined the local Jewish community. The Pleitenhof itself passed through various hands.
Refugees from Latvia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia lived there for a time, followed by German resettlers. In 1950, the property was leased to a Silesian seed-breeding family. It was divided in 1959 and passed into private ownership. Today the Pleitenhof is listed in the Bavarian register of historic monuments, recognized for its architectural significance as an example of Nazi-era Heimatstil design, though this designation makes no mention of the Jewish collective that briefly transformed it into a symbol of survival.
The broader question of what the Streicher family story reveals about postwar Germany remains contested among historians. Unlike the Heydrich family, whose widow Lina fought a prolonged legal battle for a pension and published a memoir defending her husband, or the Himmler family, whose descendants have been extensively documented, the Streichers left few traces in the historical record. This absence itself may be significant. Julius Streicher was unique among the executed Nuremberg defendants in that he had no official role in planning or executing the Holocaust.
He commanded no troops, signed no orders, and administered no camps. He was convicted and hanged solely for his words — for the 25 years of hatred he had poured into the German people through Der Stürmer. In a sense, his punishment established a precedent that incitement to genocide could itself be a capital crime. The sons of Julius Streicher, unlike some descendants of Nazi leaders who have publicly grappled with their family histories, appear to have chosen silence over confrontation.
Whether this silence reflected shame, denial, or simply a desire to live undisturbed lives cannot be determined from available sources. What is clear is that neither Lothar nor Elmar Streicher became public advocates for or against their father’s legacy. They neither repudiated his ideology nor carried it forward in any documented way. They simply disappeared into the anonymity that postwar Germany offered to so many who wished to forget.
The story of the Streicher family after 1945 mirrors in miniature the broader German experience of coming to terms with the Nazi past. For decades, silence prevailed. The generation that had lived through the Reich rarely spoke of their experiences, and their children often learned nothing of what their parents had done or witnessed. It was not until the 1960s and later, with the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in Germany, that a more serious reckoning began.
Even then, many families chose to maintain their silence. The Streichers appear to have been among them. Julius Streicher’s legacy endures not through his family, but through the precedent set by his conviction and execution. The Nuremberg Tribunal’s judgment that his words made him an accessory to murder — that propaganda could be a weapon as deadly as any gun — established a principle that continues to shape international law.
Notably, Streicher held the distinction of being the only defendant at the main Nuremberg trial executed solely for the expression of ideas. He had not commanded troops, administered camps, or signed deportation orders. His crime was creating the climate of hatred that made the Holocaust possible. When prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda sought to hold radio broadcasters accountable for inciting genocide in 1994, they cited Streicher’s case as precedent.
The broadcasters at Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines had done for Rwanda what Streicher had done for Germany. They had dehumanized their victims and called for their extermination. The principle he helped establish — that those who spread hatred can be held responsible for the violence that follows — remains a cornerstone of international human rights law. Legal scholars continue to debate the implications of his case.
Some, like the late Nuremberg jurist and author General Telford Taylor, reconsidered their views over time. In 1991, Taylor suggested that Streicher had perhaps been unjustly convicted and hanged for his writing alone, a position that remains controversial among historians and legal experts. For the Streicher family, there was no estate to reclaim, no pension to fight for, no public rehabilitation to seek. Julius Streicher died without property or position.
His wealth confiscated, his newspaper silenced, his name synonymous with the worst excesses of Nazi hatred. His widow vanished into obscurity. His sons lived quiet lives about which little is known and less is documented. The Pleitenhof, the estate that represented his corrupt gains, became a training ground for the very people he had sought to destroy before passing into other hands entirely.
The contrast with other Nazi families is striking. Emmy Göring, widow of the Reichsmarschall, was arrested, tried, and sentenced to a year in a labor camp before publishing her memoirs in 1967. Lina Heydrich fought a prolonged legal battle for a widow’s pension and ran a guest house on the island of Fehmarn until her death in 1985, never wavering in her defense of her husband. Ilse Hess corresponded constantly with her imprisoned husband Rudolf and raised their son Wolf Rüdiger to carry on the family’s cause.
The Streicher family, by contrast, left almost no trace. Whether this reflects a recognition of guilt, a desire to escape the burden of the family name, or simply the practical difficulties faced by a family with no property and no allies in postwar Germany remains unknown. In the end, the Streicher family’s postwar story is defined not by what happened, but by what did not. No memoirs, no interviews, no public reckoning — just silence and the fading memory of a name that Germany preferred to forget.
The very anonymity that Lothar and Elmar achieved may be the most telling verdict on their father’s legacy. While some children of Nazi leaders grappled publicly with their inheritance, confronting, defending, or simply trying to understand, the Streichers chose to disappear. Whether they found peace in that obscurity or lived out their days haunted by the shadow of their father’s crimes, no historian has yet discovered.
