by Daniel Kester– last updated Dec 2010

Der Sturmer

The Nazis had a thing about Jewish men having sex with “Aryan” women.  So in 1935 when Albert Hirschland, the principal of a business college in Magdeburg, was accused of having sex with underage non-Jewish students, the Nazis had a field day.

(Albert was the son of Moses, son of Salomon, son of Jonas, one of the three original Hirschland brothers.)

Hirschland was arrested and put on trial for “race defilement”, and details were published and broadcast throughout Germany. The Hirschland trial was one of the Nazi’s biggest propaganda efforts up to that time, and they used it to try and demonstrate the perverted nature of the Jews.

Accusations were made of Hirschland seducing hundreds of innocent girls, and of mass orgies in a friend’s apartment. The virulently anti-Semitic paper, “Der Sturmer” put out a special 16-page issue about, “Albert Hirschland, the Race-defiler from Magdeburg.”  Two million copies of the special issue were distributed. The media campaign in Magdeburg and nationally “reached a frenzy of demonization and hatred”. (Note that there were times in the American South that black men were summarily lynched for having relations with white women. No trial required.)

Hirschland was convicted of five counts of illicit sexual acts and sentenced to 10 years in prison and 10 years of “preventive detention”. The anti-Jewish hysteria that the Nazis whipped up helped set the stage for the Nuremburg laws introduced later that year, which stripped the Jews of many of their rights and made marriage as well as sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews illegal. After the trial, Albert Hirschland was sent to prison. In 1943 we was sent on to Auschwitz where he was murdered.

Julius Streicher, publisher of “Der Sturmer”, was tried at the Nuremburg trials and found guilty of crimes against humanity for his “incitement to murder and extermination”. He was executed in 1946.

(Source: Michael Abrahams-Sproud, Life under Siege: The Jews of Magdeburg under Nazi Rule) — Parenthetical material are notes from Victoria Hess