Synopsis
The Nuremberg Trial of Julius Streicher: The Crime of "Incitement to Genocide", published in 2012 by legal scholar and senior lecturer Dr. Margaret Eastwood, is an in-depth academic investigation into one of the most legally complex and significant prosecutions of the post-WWII International Military Tribunal. Rather than offering a general biography of Julius Streicher—the notoriously fanatical Nazi propagandist and publisher of the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer—Eastwood focuses on the "behind-the-scenes" legal evolution of his trial. Her central thesis is that the specific international crime of "incitement to genocide" was not the result of a carefully planned, pre-war legislative effort. Instead, she argues it emerged organically, almost as an unintended side effect, through the improvised courtroom strategy and selective legal reinterpretation of Streicher's hate speech by the Nuremberg prosecutors and judges.
Eastwood meticulously reconstructs the pre-trial preparations, cross-examinations, and final pleadings to show how the prosecution team struggled to fit Streicher’s purely verbal and written bigotry into the existing framework of the Nuremberg Charter. Because Streicher was not a military commander, never personally killed anyone, and was largely frozen out of direct policymaking by the 1940s, convicting him of "crimes against humanity" required the court to forge a new legal link. The book details how prosecutors successfully argued that Streicher’s decades of "poisoning" the minds of the German public, particularly youth, actively primed the population to accept and participate in the physical extermination of European Jewry, thereby rendering his propaganda a lethal instrument of mass murder.
Ultimately, the book highlights how the landmark judgment against Streicher laid the foundation for modern international law regarding hate speech. Eastwood fills a critical gap in legal history by examining how this highly irregular case directly influenced and paved the way for the formal criminalization of "direct and public incitement to commit genocide" in the United Nations' 1948 Genocide Convention. Her work serves as an authoritative, cautionary study on the power of the printed word, showing how international jurisprudence was forced to adapt to punish those who orchestrate mass atrocities not with weapons, but with vitriol.