What If Julius Streicher Had Been Acquitted?

On 16 October 1946, Julius Streicher walked to the gallows in Nuremberg insisting he was no murderer. He had never signed a deportation order, never commanded a firing squad, never run a camp. His crime, the judges said, was words.

Streicher, founder and editor of the Nazi weekly Der Stürmer, was convicted not for personally killing anyone, but for years of speeches and articles that called for the destruction of the Jews. The tribunal decided that such propaganda made him an accessory to genocide. Then they hanged him.

Julius Streicher’s Nuremberg conviction is one of the clearest early statements in international law that systematic incitement to violence can be a war crime. He was punished for what he published, not what he physically did.

So what if the judges had gone the other way? What if Streicher had been acquitted or given a light sentence on the grounds that he never pulled a trigger? To answer that, you have to look at who he was, what he printed, and what the Allies were trying to build in 1945.

Why Julius Streicher’s words were treated like weapons

Julius Streicher was not a major strategist of the Third Reich. He was a schoolteacher turned demagogue who found his calling in hatred. In 1923 he founded Der Stürmer, a weekly paper devoted almost entirely to antisemitic pornography, conspiracy theories, and calls for expulsion or extermination of Jews.

By the mid‑1930s, Der Stürmer had a circulation in the hundreds of thousands. Copies were pinned in public display cases, the infamous Stürmerkasten, where passersby could read cartoons of hook‑nosed Jews abusing German children or stealing from honest Aryans. Children saw it on their way to school. Adults saw it on their way to work.

Streicher’s editorials did not hide behind euphemism. He wrote that Jews were a “bacillus” to be eradicated. He praised pogroms. After the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, he celebrated the smashed synagogues as a “sign from heaven.” During the war, as deportations and mass shootings escalated, he kept publishing pieces that framed the destruction of European Jewry as necessary self‑defense.

At Nuremberg, prosecutors could not tie Streicher to a specific killing order. What they had was a paper trail of poison. They argued that his work prepared the German public to accept, and even support, the Holocaust. The tribunal agreed. In its judgment, it said Streicher’s incitement was so sustained and so explicit that it was part of the machinery of extermination.

That decision turned a propagandist into a war criminal. It set the stage for later legal ideas about “direct and public incitement to commit genocide.” So if we change that verdict, we are not just changing one man’s fate. We are shaking a legal precedent that still shapes how the world thinks about hate speech and mass violence.

Scenario 1: Acquitted on free‑speech grounds, Streicher walks

Imagine the judges in 1946 accept a narrow view of responsibility. They say: Streicher is vile, but he never ordered, organized, or physically took part in killings. His writings are protected as political opinion, or at least beyond the scope of a war crimes tribunal. He is acquitted on Count 4 (crimes against humanity) and released after time served.

This is not completely outlandish. Even at Nuremberg, there was debate about how far to stretch criminal liability. Some defendants were acquitted entirely. Others, like Hans Fritzsche, a radio commentator and head of the radio division in Goebbels’ ministry, were acquitted despite heavy involvement in Nazi propaganda. The court decided Fritzsche’s broadcasts did not amount to direct participation in crimes.

If Streicher had been treated more like Fritzsche, several things follow.

First, the early law of incitement to genocide would look very different. The United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention in 1948. One of its key phrases is “direct and public incitement to commit genocide” as a punishable act, even if genocide is not completed. Streicher’s case was a major reference point for that clause. An acquittal would have weakened the argument that propaganda alone could be criminal at the international level.

Second, postwar Germany’s own legal and political culture might have shifted. West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s passed laws against Volksverhetzung, “incitement of the people,” which criminalized certain kinds of hate speech, especially antisemitic agitation. Courts and lawmakers could point back to Nuremberg and Streicher as moral and legal justification. If he had been acquitted, defenders of a broad free‑speech approach would have had a powerful counterexample: if Nuremberg did not hang Streicher, why should Bonn jail some neo‑Nazi pamphleteer?

Third, Streicher himself. He was already politically sidelined by 1940, removed from his post as Gauleiter of Franconia for corruption and personal scandals. But an acquittal would have made him a martyr to hard‑core Nazis. In a world where many former Nazis quietly reintegrated into West German society, a living Streicher could have been a rallying point for the most radical antisemitic underground, especially in the late 1940s and early 1950s when millions of Germans were angry, displaced, and looking for scapegoats.

Would he have restarted Der Stürmer? The Allied occupation authorities controlled the press tightly in those years, so not legally. But he could have written, spoken in private circles, or been used in propaganda by foreign actors interested in destabilizing West Germany. The early Cold War was full of such opportunities.

So what? An acquittal on free‑speech grounds would have weakened the emerging idea that systematic, targeted propaganda can be a crime in itself, and it might have given postwar antisemitism in Germany a more visible, unrepentant figurehead.

Scenario 2: Convicted but spared the rope, Streicher as a long‑term prisoner

Now adjust the dial. The judges still convict Streicher for crimes against humanity, but decide that hanging a man for words goes too far. They give him, say, life imprisonment or a 20‑year sentence instead of death.

This scenario is closer to how some Nuremberg judges reportedly felt. There were internal disagreements about the death penalty, and not all legal systems represented on the tribunal used hanging. Some of the American defense lawyers argued that propaganda, no matter how disgusting, should not carry the same punishment as mass murder.

In this world, Streicher goes to Spandau Prison in Berlin alongside Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, and other high‑ranking Nazis. He spends decades behind bars, occasionally making news with outbursts or interviews, but never again holding a printing press.

The legal precedent is still there. The tribunal has said: incitement of this scale is a crime against humanity. The Genocide Convention can still cite Streicher. Later courts, like the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the 1990s, which convicted radio executives for inciting the 1994 genocide, can still point back to him.

What changes is the symbolic weight. The fact that Nuremberg hanged a man for propaganda sent a harsh signal: words, when used to organize mass hatred, are not just “speech.” They are part of the machinery of killing. A prison sentence would have softened that message. It would have suggested a hierarchy: killers at the top, propagandists one rung down.

Domestically, West German debates about free speech and hate speech might have been slightly different. Lawmakers could still say, “Nuremberg convicted Streicher,” but opponents could reply, “Yes, and even then they did not hang him.” That nuance matters when courts weigh how far to go in punishing extremist speech.

There is also the human factor of Spandau itself. The prison became a symbol of Allied unity and then of Cold War absurdity, with four powers jointly guarding a handful of aging Nazis. A long‑term Streicher presence would have added a particularly toxic personality to that mix. He was volatile, self‑pitying, and obsessed with Jews. His periodic statements, smuggled or authorized, could have kept raw antisemitic rhetoric in the headlines.

So what? A non‑capital sentence would have preserved the legal finding that incitement can be criminal, but it would have diluted the moral shock value of Nuremberg’s message about the deadly power of propaganda.

Scenario 3: Streicher acquitted, propaganda recast as mere politics

Push the counterfactual further. Imagine not only Streicher is acquitted, but the tribunal’s written judgment goes out of its way to separate propaganda from direct responsibility. The judges say, in effect: propaganda is morally reprehensible, but international criminal law must focus on those who plan, order, or physically carry out atrocities.

This would not just spare Streicher. It would reshape how postwar societies think about the road to genocide.

First, the narrative of the Holocaust. Historians and educators have long emphasized that mass murder does not begin with gas chambers. It begins with words, images, and laws that dehumanize a target group. Streicher is a textbook example. If Nuremberg had treated him as outside the scope of criminal law, it would have encouraged a narrower story: the Holocaust as the work of a relatively small circle of planners and executioners, with propaganda as background noise.

Second, later tribunals. The Rwandan genocide trials in the 1990s, especially the so‑called “Media Case,” convicted leaders of the radio station RTLM and the newspaper Kangura for inciting genocide. Judges there explicitly drew a line from Streicher’s Der Stürmer to Rwandan hate media. Without Streicher as a convicted war criminal, defense lawyers in Arusha would have had more room to argue that speech, however vile, should not be criminalized unless directly linked to specific acts.

Third, domestic law in democracies. Postwar Germany, France, and several other European states wrote bans on Holocaust denial and incitement into their criminal codes. They did so in a legal culture shaped by Nuremberg. If the tribunal had clearly separated propaganda from criminal responsibility, those laws might have been narrower or delayed. Courts could still act against direct threats or calls for violence, but broader bans on racist agitation would have had a weaker foundation.

There is also a geopolitical angle. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union used propaganda extensively. The US, with its strong First Amendment tradition, already resisted international rules that looked like restrictions on speech. An acquittal of Streicher with a judgment friendly to “mere propaganda” would have strengthened American arguments against any binding international law on hate speech. The Soviet bloc, which favored more state control of speech, would have lost an early legal weapon against Western media they disliked.

So what? Treating Streicher’s propaganda as beyond the reach of criminal law would have encouraged a narrower, more comfortable story about mass violence, one that quarantines guilt to a small group of killers and lets the architects of hatred claim they were only talking.

Which scenario is most plausible, and why does it matter?

Of the three, the second scenario is the most plausible: conviction without the death penalty.

Why? Because by 1946, the Allies were already committed to the idea that Nazi propaganda had helped make genocide possible. They had mountains of evidence: films, posters, textbooks, and papers like Der Stürmer. They had interrogations of ordinary Germans who repeated phrases straight out of Streicher’s headlines. The connection between words and deeds was too obvious to ignore.

At the same time, there was real unease about hanging a man for speech. Some judges and legal commentators worried about setting a precedent that could be abused. If propaganda is a war crime, who decides what counts as propaganda? Where is the line between incitement and harsh criticism of an enemy in wartime?

That tension is why Hans Fritzsche could be acquitted while Streicher was condemned. The tribunal drew a line: general war propaganda was not enough, but long‑term, explicit calls to exterminate a group, in a context where that extermination actually took place, crossed into criminality. Given that logic, it is hard to see the judges acquitting Streicher outright. But it is easy to imagine them saying: his guilt is real, yet the rope is too much. A long prison term would have answered the demand for justice while easing fears about punishing speech with death.

In our real timeline, they did not flinch. Streicher was hanged. That choice echoed into later decades. When the Genocide Convention named “direct and public incitement” as a crime, Streicher’s case was part of the background. When Rwandan radio executives went on trial, prosecutors cited him. When modern courts wrestle with online hate speech that calls for violence, they are working in a legal world shaped by that 1946 judgment.

So what? The actual Nuremberg verdict against Julius Streicher made a hard claim that still matters: when propaganda systematically calls for the destruction of a group, in a context where that destruction is being carried out, those who spread the poison are not bystanders. They are part of the crime.