It is just past 1:00 in the morning, October 16th, 1946. Inside the gymnasium of Nuremberg prison, a wooden gallows stands under harsh electric lights. The room smells of pine and fear. Outside, the city that gave its name to the laws that stripped millions of people of their citizenship is dark and cold. One by one, men are led through a door at the far end. 10 men will die here before dawn, but one of them will make the night unforgettable. Not because of what he did with armies or gas chambers or
deportation orders, because of what he did with a printing press, and because of what happens when the trap door opens beneath his feet. We’re going to take you through the full story of Julius Striker’s last hours. And along the way, we’re going to look at something that most histories of the Nuremberg trials gloss over quickly, the genuinely strange legal question of whether a man can be hanged for what he published. Let’s get into it. Julius Striker never commanded a single soldier. He never
signed a deportation order. He never administered a concentration camp or held a meaningful military rank. By 1940, he had even been stripped of his position as Goliter of Franconia by Herman Guring. Dismissed for corruption and personal misconduct so egregious that even the Nazi leadership found him difficult to tolerate. He was for the last 5 years of the war politically sidelined farming his estate in Plecus Hoff while the Holocaust unfolded without him in any operational sense. And yet there he was in the dock at
Nuremberg alongside Ribbonrop Kitle Cultton Bruner and the architects of the entire killing apparatus. The reason comes down to a single newspaper Durma. Striker founded it in Nuremberg in 1923 and ran it for over two decades without interruption. At its peak circulation in the late 1930s, the paper was being read by somewhere between 500,000 and 800,000 people per week. It was displayed in public glass cases on street corners across Germany, installed by local Nazi party offices so that anyone walking
past could stop and read it without paying. The content was relentless. Issue after issue, year after year, Striker’s paper published material calling for the systematic elimination of Jewish people in terms that left no ambiguity whatsoever. Not dog whistles, direct calls. The paper celebrated violence, published fabricated accounts of ritual murder, and in the years after 1941, began explicitly referencing the mass killings already underway in the East as something to be welcomed and continued. The prosecution at Nuremberg
argued and the tribunal accepted that this kind of sustained public incitement over two decades created the psychological conditions in which genocide became possible and then normal. Striker didn’t pull a lever. He shaped what millions of ordinary Germans believed was acceptable, necessary, even righteous. That the court decided made him as culpable as the men who ran the camps. His defense tried to raise free press arguments. The tribunal wasn’t interested. The verdict delivered in October 1946 found him guilty on count
four crimes against humanity. The sentence was death by hanging. What makes Striker’s case sit uncomfortably even now almost 80 years later is how far it pushed the legal concept of complicity. He is in the entire history of the Neuremberg trials the only senior defendant convicted and executed purely on the basis of words not actions. Words that is not an argument for his innocence. It is an observation about how significant the precedent was. The tribunal was saying in writing that incitement to genocide at scale is
itself a crime against humanity regardless of whether the inciter personally harmed anyone. That ruling is part of the foundation of international criminal law today. None of that mattered much to Striker himself, as October 16th arrived. His behavior in the hours before the execution was, by every account left by those present, deeply strange. He had reportedly spent his final days in his cell in a state of agitated defiance rather than fear or remorse. When guards came to prepare him, witnesses described him as
combative and contemptuous. He was brought into the gymnasium after Yoakimon Ribbentrop after Wilhelm Kitle after Ernst Cultton Bruner, after Alfred Rosenberg and Hansf Frank. The first executions had already taken place. The room had already seen death that night. Striker walked in. He looked around at the witnesses gathered there, including several journalists given official access to observe and report. Kingsbury Smith, a correspondent for the International News Service, was among them, and his account published the
following day, remains one of the most detailed records of what actually happened. Striker reportedly shouted a final salute to his former leader as he was led across the floor. When he reached the steps of the gallows and was asked to confirm his name for the official record, he gave it. Then according to Smith’s account, as he was positioned on the trapoor and the black hood was being placed over his head, Striker turned toward the witnesses and shouted two words in German. Purimsfest, 1946. Purim, the Jewish holiday that
marks the story told in the book of Esther. Hmon, a senior official in the Persian court who plotted to exterminate the Jewish people, was ultimately hanged on the very gallows he had built for others. Striker was telling the witnesses in his last conscious moments that he saw himself as Hmon, that he believed the entire proceeding was a Jewish act of revenge, that history was repeating itself, and he was its victim, who was a calculated piece of defiance, maybe the most deliberate thing he did
in his entire life. He had clearly planned what he wanted to say on those steps, had probably rehearsed it in his cell for days. He wanted the last word to be a provocation. He got it. But what happened next took the provocation out of his hands entirely. The trap opened and Julius Striker did not die. Not quickly, anyway. A clean hanging relies on a specific set of physics. The drop has to be calculated so that the force of the fall ends life immediately upon impact. Get the calculation wrong and
the drop is too short. The rope tightens. The individual suffers a prolonged and difficult end. It can take several minutes. The hangman that night was Master Sergeant John C. Woods of the United States Army, who had been assigned to carry out the Nuremberg executions. Woods had performed hangings before, but his technical competence was questioned both before and after that night. The drop calculations for several of the condemned men that evening appeared to be insufficient. Multiple witnesses and journalists reported that
at least some of the men did not die cleanly. For Striker, the accounts are specific. Kingsbury Smith wrote that after the drop, the rope continued to move, that it did not go still. The movement beneath the platform indicated that the process was not proceeding as intended. Guards reportedly had to wait an extended period before medical personnel could confirm death. Some accounts suggest it took as long as 14 minutes for Striker to die, though the exact duration is disputed. What is not disputed is that it was not immediate.
Whether the miscalculation was accidental or deliberate has never been established. Woods himself gave contradictory statements in the years afterward. The US Army conducted no formal inquiry into the technical execution of the hangings. The men were dead. That was considered sufficient. There is something almost grotesque about the specific nature of his death. A man who spent 23 years writing about the suffering of others who turned that suffering into entertainment and political currency, enduring a prolonged
struggle while the witnesses stood and watched. History has a way of constructing those moments. Whether it deserves them is a different question. After all 10 executions were completed, the bodies were transported south to Munich. The decision about what to do with the remains had been made well in advance by American military authorities. And it reflected a fear that was entirely reasonable given what they had just spent a year documenting that the graves of executed Nazi leaders would become pilgrimage sites shrines.
That is not a hypothetical concern. It has happened repeatedly with the graves of lesser figures. The bodies were cremated at the Ostred Hof, the East Cemetery in Munich. The cremation was conducted quietly without ceremony without record beyond what was required for official documentation. Then the ashes all 10 urns were taken to a location outside the city. The convent is a small stream that flows through the southern outskirts of Munich before joining the river. It is not a famous waterway. It does not appear in tourist
guides. There is nothing about it that suggests historical significance. That was precisely the point. The ashes of Julius Striker and of Ribbentrop, Kitle, Colton Bruner, and the others were scattered into that stream, carried into the Isa, dispersed, gone. No grave, no marker, no location a future admirer could visit and lay flowers and feel something. The decision was cold and practical, and in its own way, exactly right. The Allies had spent years dealing with a movement built on the power of symbols. They understood better
than most what a grave could become. The water took the ashes and that was that. What stays with me about Striker’s story and I keep coming back to this is the question his conviction forced the world to answer. At what point does the thing you say become the thing you did? The Nuremberg tribunal drew that line at incitement to genocide. Whether that line is drawn correctly and where it sits in relation to free expression is something legal scholars and historians still argue about. But Striker is the
case they argue it with. He is in a very specific sense the test case for whether words alone can constitute a crime against humanity. The tribunal said yes and that answer is still being used. The gymnasium in Nuremberg where he was hanged no longer exists in its original form. The prison complex was largely demolished in the postwar decades. The convent runs where it always has, indifferent to what was scattered into it on an autumn night in 1946. If you found this worth your time, please leave
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