The rope didn’t kill him quickly. It strangled him slowly, agonizingly for 15 full minutes while the world watched. And when it was finally over, not a single person in that gymnasium wept. Not one. This is the story of Julius Striker, the most hated man at Nermberg. A man so vile, so obsessively evil that even as fellow Nazis refused to sit near him.
A man whose words helped pave the road to the Holocaust and whose death became one of the most disturbing executions in modern history. Stay with me because this story goes places most history books won’t. If you’re new here, welcome to Untold War Story. We dig into the chapters of history that get buried, suppressed, or simply forgotten.
Hit that subscribe button and the bell icon right now because this channel is about to become your favorite rabbit hole. Now, let’s get into it. October 1st, 1946, the verdict, Nuremberg, Germany, a city that had once hosted Adolf Hitler’s most theatrical rallies, was now the setting for something entirely different.
Justice. After 10 grueling months of testimony, evidence, and legal argument, the International Military Tribunal delivered its verdicts against 21 of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany. These weren’t foot soldiers. These were the architects, generals, ministers, propagandists, industrialists, the people who built the machine.
12 of them were sentenced to death by hanging. One of those 12 was Julius Striker. In his story, it’s unlike any of the others. Julius Striker was born on February 12th, 1885 in Fleinhousen, a small town in the German Empire. He was the ninth child of a primary school teacher, a fact that seems almost darkly ironic given what he would later do with words and education.
He became a teacher himself in 1904. Kies described him as hot-tempered and authoritarian, the kind of man who needed to dominate every room he entered. In 1909, he transferred to Nuremberg, a city that would define the rest of his life. Four years later, he married Kuning Gundi Roth, the daughter of a baker, and the couple had two sons.
When World War I broke out in July 1914, Striker enlisted with the German army. He fought with the sixth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, earned the Iron Cross first and second class, and rose to the rank of lieutenant. Despite a military record spotted with disciplinary complaints, he was difficult.
Even then, Germany’s defeat in November 1918 broke something in men like Striker. The humiliation of surrender, the chaos of the postwar years, the economic devastation, it all needed someone to blame. and Striker had already decided who that someone was. By 1919, Striker had joined a right-wing association called the Society for Defense and Protective Action, where he unleashed anti-semitic rhetoric for the first time in public.
It wouldn’t be the last. He cycled through several nationalist organizations, always pushing them harder toward racial hatred, until finally in 1922, he merged his personal following into a small, still fringe movement called the National Socialist German Workers Party, the Nazi party. He was one of its earliest members.
A year later, in 1923, he launched the newspaper that would define his legacy, Durmer, the attacker. It was unlike anything in mainstream German media. It combined violent anti-semitic ideology with crude pornographic imagery. Week after week, it portrayed Jewish men as sexual predators targeting German women. It used grotesque caricatures.
It published what historians now classify as political pornography, content designed not just to inform, but to inflame, disgust, and dehumanize. In one particularly deranged speech, Striker claimed that a Jewish man’s semen was a foreign protein capable of permanently corrupting an Aryan woman’s bloodline after a single encounter.
He was not speaking metaphorically. He genuinely believed this, or at least knew his audience would. By 1935, Durst Sturmer had a peak circulation of 600,000 copies per week. Adolf Hitler declared it his favorite newspaper and had copies displayed in class fronted public cases across Germany so that ordinary citizens, children included, could read it on their way to work or school.
Streer didn’t stop at adult readers. His publishing firm, which made him a multi-millionaire, released anti-Semitic books specifically targeting children. The most notorious was durul published in 1938 and translated as the poisonous mushroom. We used the metaphor of a beautiful but deadly toad stool to warn German children about Jewish people, painting them as dangerous predators hiding in plain sight.
In 1936, his firm also published Trust No Fox on his green heath and no Jew on his oath. Written by a 20-year-old kindergarten teacher and Nazi supporter named Elvver Bower. The book depicted Jews as literal children of the devil. It was printed in at least 70,000 copies and distributed to schools. These weren’t fringe pamphlets.
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They were part of a calculated stateup supported campaign to raise an entire generation of children who saw their Jewish neighbors as subhuman threats. Historians today are unambiguous. This propaganda directly contributed to the psychological conditions that made the Holocaust possible.
Frankenfer the beast of Nuremberg striker’s power grew through the 1930s as Goliter district leader of Franconia with Nuremberg as its capital. He became one of the most feared men in the region. People called him the Frankenfurer, the king of Nuremberg, and most ominously the beast of Franconia. In August 1938, he personally ordered the demolition of Nuremberg’s grand synagogue.
His stated reason, he didn’t like the architecture. He claimed it disfigured the beautiful German townscape. He organized a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1st, 1333. The first coordinated government sanctioned economic attack on Jewish citizens in Nazi Germany. SA stormtroopers stood menacingly outside Jewish shops and offices.
The Star of David was painted in yellow and black on thousands of windows and doors. signs reading, “Don’t buy from Jews and the Jews are our misfortune plastered storefronts across the country.” It was the opening act of what would become the Holocaust. But even within the Nazi party, Julius Striker was considered unstable.
Rivals described him as not entirely sane. He was known for striding through the streets of Nuremberg, cracking a bullhip. He was credibly accused of raping political prisoners. He enriched himself obscenely during the aranization of Jewish property, buying businesses and homes at forced sales for fractions of their value, sometimes less than 10%.
His powerful rival Herman Goring Kenir the Luftwafa despised him. Striker reportedly spread rumors that Goring was impotent and that his daughter Eda, whose godfather was Hitler himself, was conceived through artificial insemination. Goring moved to destroy him. An official investigation uncovered Striker’s rampant corruption.
On February 16th, 1940, he was stripped of all party offices and effectively exiled to his private estate, Striker Hoof, 20 kilometers outside Nerburgg. He was forbidden from entering the city that had made him infamous. Yet Hitler, ever loyal to old comrades, allowed him to keep his title, his uniform, and his newspaper.
Even disgraced, Striker kept making money. In 1943, his wife Kuna Gundai died after 30 years of marriage. When Germany collapsed in May 1945, Striker fled to the Austrian Alps, disguised himself as a painter, and gave himself the false name Siler. He didn’t fool anyone for long. On May 23rd, 1945, American soldiers of the one and First Airborne Division, the legendary Screaming Eagles, tracked him down in his mountain hideout.
The officer leading the arrest was Major Henry Plit, a man of Jewish heritage. The irony was not lost on the German public. News spread quickly. The greatest Jewer in Germany was arrested by a Jew. During early interrogations, Striker appeared mentally confused. Some believed it was genuine deterioration. Others suspected performance.
Either way, it didn’t matter. The evidence against him was overwhelming and it had been written, published, and distributed by his own hand for 25 years. At Nuremberg, Striker faced two charges: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. He used the courtroom as a stage exactly as he’d used his newspaper, ranting against Jews, attacking the legitimacy of the Allied court, and quoting Jewish religious texts he’d spent decades weaponizing.
Court officers repeatedly had to silence him. Fellow defendants wanted nothing to do with him. Among all the Nermberg accused, Striker recorded the lowest IQ score. Guards describe him as the dirty old man of the prison, a chaotic, degraded figure who had devolved far from the powerful agitator he’d once been.
One American guard, Edward Gardner, recalled years later that Striker would stop soldiers in the hallway every morning and beg for chewing gum on his way to the courtroom. The tribunal acquitted him of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, but found him guilty of crimes against humanity. The judgment read in part, “For his 25 years of speaking, writing, and preaching hatred of the Jews, Striker was widely known as Jewer number one.
In his speeches and articles week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-semitism and incited the German people to active persecution. Striker’s incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the east were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitutes a crime against humanity.
He was sentenced to death by hanging. Striker and Nazi broadcaster Hans Fritzky became the first individuals in history to be indicted for what would later be formally classified as incitement to genocide, a legal category that now shapes international law around the world. October 16, 1946. The execution, the hanging was carried out by US Army Sergeant John C.
Woods, who had little documented experience as an executioner. What happened next has been debated by historians ever since. Some believe the botched executions were deliberate, a final calculated punishment for men who had overseen the deaths of millions. The trapdo mechanism was too small. Several condemned men suffered severe head injuries as they dropped through it. The rope planks were miscalculated.
Instead of a clean, instant break of the neck, the condemned died by slow strangulation. When Striker reached the bottom of the scaffold steps, he thrust his fist into the air and shouted, “Hile Hitler!” An American officer asked if he had any final words. Striker turned to the interpreter and screamed, “The Boleviks will hang you one day.
” Then in a chilling final reference, he called out, “Purim Fest 1946, invoking the Jewish festival of Purim, which commemorates the execution of Hammon and his 10 sons by hanging.” The parallel was not accidental. As the black hood was pulled over his head, his muffled last words were quiet, almost tender. Adele, my dear wife.
The trap door opened with a loud bang. Journalist Joseph Kingsbury Smith covering the executions for the International News Service reported that Striker went down kicking. Groaning sounds were heard beneath the scaffold. Because the drop was insufficient to snap his neck, Julius Striker strangled to death over the course of 15 agonizing minutes.
He was 61 years old. His corpse was cremated. His ashes were scattered into the river Esar. Sergeant Woods later stated publicly that he had performed all 10 executions correctly, and that he was very proud of his work. No one who witnessed Julius Striker’s death shed a single tear. Julius Striker never personally ordered the death of a single person.
He never commanded troops or ran a concentration camp. But the tribunal understood something essential that genocide doesn’t begin with gas chambers. It begins with words, with newspapers, with children’s books, with a slow, patient process of convincing ordinary people that their neighbors are something less than human. Striker proved that a pen in the hands of a fanatic can be as lethal as any weapon.
That’s the story history doesn’t always tell. But untold war story does. If this video hit different, smash that like button and subscribe. Every week we bring you the stories that got buried, the moments of history that changed everything. Don’t miss the next one. We’ll see you there.
