Nuremberg, 75 Years After

The world will doubtless mark the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials, which began in November 1945, as a model of international law. For the first Nazi executed at Nuremberg, however, the trial embodied not multilateralism but rather the revenge of the Jews. This was made clear in an eerie moment 11 months later, one whose historical and theological lessons reverberate to this day.

On October 16, 1946, Julius Streicher—the Nazi’s Nazi, publisher of Der Stürmer, the man who personally ordered the destruction of the Great Synagogue of Nuremberg on Kristallnacht—was taken to be hanged. As Newsweek reported, Streicher did not die with dignity: “He had to be pushed across the floor, wild-eyed and screaming ‘Heil Hitler!’ Mounting the steps he cried out: ‘And now I go to God.’ He stared at the witnesses facing the gallows and shouted: ‘Purimfest 1946.’”

That is a reference to the Jewish holiday of Purim, which marks the tale told in the book of Esther: the rise of Haman as vizier of Persia and his attempt to wipe out the Jews. In the end, Haman himself is hanged on the gallows, and later, following a war against his allies, Haman’s 10 sons are hanged as well. In invoking Purim, Streicher drew on an anti-Semitic trope with a long German lineage. Purim, for Martin Luther, reflected the bloodthirsty nature of the Jews, as he noted in a text called On the Jews and Their Lies: