THE NUREMBERG TRIAL OF JULIUS STREICHER: The Crime of Incitement to Genocide

In a total rational world, you would expect new offences to be enacted through a process of reflection, research or various programs of reform, undertaken deliberately, by planned law reform commissions, or through comparative analysis with other legal systems. This research proposes that the emergence of one particular offence, 'incitement to genocide', was not the result of a deliberate attempt to create new offence, nor that its origins came from a rational process of planned codification. Rather, it argues that the creation of this offence was an unintended side effect of the trial and pre-trial process, during the first major war crimes trial held in Nuremberg after World War II in 1945/6.

This reconstruction provides the first comprehensive study that gives an in depth analysis, which explores how the defendant, Julius Streicher's anti-Semitic propaganda published in a private newspaper, Der Stunner could, though a process of selective reinterpretation by the Nuremberg Tribunal, be classified as inciting mass murder through words alone, under the remit of crimes against humanity in Article 6(c) of the Nuremberg Charter, In 1945, the crime of inciting mass murder through words alone was not recognized or classified as a criminal offence by international criminal law, no precedents existed for its definition, nature, scope, or, its prosecution, defense, or determination of an appropriate sentence, should defendants be found guilty. This study fills a gap in existing literature by focusing on the legal dilemmas and interpretations faced by all parties 'behind the scenes' involved in the prosecution and 'birth' of' incitement to genocide' prior to its legal recognition as an offence by the 1948, Genocide Convention.