genocide in rwanda

Julius Streicher
"Jew-Baiter Number One"
1885—1946

"For the course of some 25 years this man educated the whole of the German people in hatred and he incited them to the persecution and to the extermination of the Jewish race. He was an accessory to murder, perhaps on a scale never attained before."—Lieutenant Colonel M. C. Griffith-Jones, Junior Counsel for the United Kingdom

Orchestrator of the anti-Jewish boycott of 1933. Instigator of the destruction of German synagogues. Gauleiter of Franconia. Obergruppenführer in the SA. Reichstag delegate. Despite his direct participation in the implementation of the Holocaust, Julius Streicher’s role as propagandist secured his conviction at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal on Count Four of the indictment: the charge of "crimes against humanity".

Streicher’s April 1925 exhortation, "Let us make a new beginning today so that we can annihilate the Jews", is cited in Tribunal testimony at Nuremberg as the earliest explicit statement of the Nazis’ genocidal intent.

A common motif in Streicher’s weekly Der Stürmer (The Stormer) is the murderous anti-Aryan intentions harbored by all Jews. Illustrations purporting to show Jews slitting the throats of Aryan girls and torturing Aryan boys in underground crypts invoke the "blood libel" which has demonized Jews since the 12th century. Splattered with gory graphics and inflammatory messages, Der Stürmer indoctrinates readers into a worldview of violence and bloodlust, at the same time identifying an immediate peril to every Aryan life and thus exalting physical assaults on Jews to essential, even heroic acts of communal self-defense.
The Nazi reich is an instructive parallel for understanding Rwanda, not only as a case study in incitement but also as a tool for gaining critical distance from the fictions used to mask attempts at racial extermination. In the prevailing history of the Third Reich, genocide stands exposed as planned and premeditated, a matter of policy deliberately exploiting ancient ethnic hatreds rather than their spontaneous eruption into violence. And though this genocide was fought amid the climate of conventional war, we understand it as a horror distinct from the crimes of war, its victims a target of deliberate destruction rather than a sacrifice to victory.

< back to timeline<