The worst of the Nazi perpetrators were prosecuted for their crimes in Nuremberg, Germany in 1946.  These 24 defendants had wreaked devastation and cruelty on the world at a level never even imagined before this time.  Among the men in the dock was Julius Streicher.  He was charged with crimes against humanity, found guilty, and hanged. 

He had not killed a single person himself.  What, then, was his offense? 

He edited a newspaper, Der Stürmer, or The Stormer.  The paper’s goal: to incite antisemitic hatred and violence against Jews.  The paper was immensely popular, with readership of more than 500,000.1 

“People’s receiver” Radio made in Berlin in 1933. CC BY-SA 3.0| License: https://tinyurl.com/yzpewa6e

The paper profiled Jews as communists, white slavers and leaders of prostitution rings, as murderers of Christian children, and as sexual defilers of Aryan German women.  Jews were blamed for Germany’s loss in World War I and for the country’s economic collapse in the early 1930s.  Der Stürmer’s portrayal of Jews as subhuman ultimately led Nazi supporters to exterminate Jews as a plague and an infestation on the German body politic. 

Half a century later, radical Hutus in Rwanda blamed that country’s famine, economic collapse, and political instability on Tutsis, and in one hundred days, nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered.  The playbook was reminiscent of Streicher:  radicalization and hate through the media, in this case through print and radio. 

In December 2003, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda issued a guilty verdict in the trial of three media executives in Rwanda.2  Two of the three defendants received life sentences; the third was sentenced to 35 years in prison.  Their crimes, like Streicher’s, were incitement to murder and violence. 

Words matter.  In April 2021, in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Holocaust survivors around the world participated in a social media program, #ItStartedWithWords.3  The campaign was designed to raise awareness about the use of hate speech to pave the way for horrific violence.   

The “gas chambers in Auschwitz and elsewhere did not begin with bricks,” Abe Foxman, born in Poland, said in his message. “They began with words. Evil words, hateful words, anti-Semitic words.”4 

Antisemitic incitement has reached new heights in the last few years.  On July 30, 2021, Deborah Lipstadt, Emery University professor, was nominated to serve as the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, a position with the rank of ambassador.5 Words matter.