Streicher established a publishing house in Nuremberg which became the leading publisher of anti-Semitic literature. He published “some of the most vile antiJewish 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 Sturmer 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, Hohne 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 T able 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 Sturmer did not go far enough, noting that—“the Jew is baser, fiercer, [and even] more diabolical than Streicher depicted him.”30
World History
