Bidspirit auction | Press Photograph Capturing the Moment

Press Photograph Capturing the Moment of the Capture of Nazi War Criminal Julius Streicher. May 1945 - ”Julius Streicher Captured!” – Press photograph documenting the moment of the capture of one of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, Julius Streicher. May 23, 1945. The reverse bears the official archival caption, including a ”CONFIDENTIAL” military censorship stamp and the name of the military photographer, Harry Hagelstein, of the 3264th Signal Service Company. Julius Streicher, founder and editor of the virulently antisemitic propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer and Gauleiter of Franconia, was one of the principal architects of the hatred that paved the way for the destruction of European Jewry. As described in the original U.S. Army Signal Corps caption accompanying the photograph, Streicher was captured in the town of Böhmischbruck (identified in the caption as Boskie) in southern Germany by two American soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division. In an attempt to avoid detection and arrest, he had grown a full beard - making him look entirely different from his familiar appearance in Nazi uniform - and posed as an ordinary German civilian, claiming to be a landscape painter dressed in plain clothes and a raincoat. His deception came to an end when Major Henry Plitt, a Jewish-American officer, recognized him and arrested him at a small farm in the area. The photograph shows an elderly, bearded Streicher, wearing a hat, as he is questioned by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Danahy of the 101st Airborne Division shortly after his capture. The accompanying caption notes that Streicher walked with a cane and suffered from a slight limp, and that he had already been removed from his official position in 1940 following internal corruption scandals within the Nazi Party. Streicher's capture marked the beginning of a story that would conclude less than a year and a half later at the Nuremberg Trials, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity for his central role in incitement to genocide and was executed by hanging in October 1946. Julius Streicher's cruelty ranked among the most destructive and sadistic manifestations of the Nazi regime. He transformed antisemitism into a systematic campaign of dehumanization. Through his notorious newspaper Der Stürmer, published between 1923 and 1945, Streicher disseminated virulent propaganda portraying Jews as bacteria and parasites that had to be exterminated, deliberately poisoning the minds of millions of Germans and helping prepare the public for genocide. Rather than engaging in complex political discourse, the newspaper appealed to the basest instincts of the masses through simplistic language, sensational headlines, and grotesque caricatures of Jews that appeared with relentless regularity. Streicher's brutality was also evident on a personal level. As Gauleiter of Franconia, he was known to carry a riding whip, violently seize Jewish property, and was personally responsible for the destruction of the Great Synagogue of Nuremberg, even before Kristallnacht. His obsessive and relentless incitement was considered so extreme that the judges of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg sentenced him to death by hanging for crimes against humanity, ruling that his activities had amounted to ”injecting the poison of antisemitism into the minds of thousands of Germans, causing them to follow the National Socialist policy of Jewish persecution and extermination.” His propaganda became one of the ideological forces that directly fueled the machinery of mass murder. 23 × 18 cm. Good condition.