Reference to crimes against humanity and, specifically, the persecution of the Jews came up regularly in the examination of the defendants in the Nuremberg trial.

It was the dominant issue in the case of Julius Streicher, editor of the pornographic Der Stürmer and Gauleiter of Nuremberg.

According to the recounting of the trial published by Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, Streicher's testimony and cross-examination were noteworthy mainly for what they revealed about the accused — a coarse, garrulous, repulsive fanatic, whom even Nazi loyalists found embarrassing, and who visibly discomfited his German attorney, Dr. Hanns Marx.

It seemed difficult for some to associate him with the planning for the elimination of the Jews that yoked statesmen and technocrats, military and civilians, Germans, and other nationalities in a vast, European-wide program of great scope and complexity. Streicher did not deny his antisemitism, of course.

Regarding the Jews, former Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, the number-two man in the Reich, was characteristically unrepentant.

Allowed to give full, even leisurely, responses to his attorney, Otto Stahmer, the Reichsmarschall explained his approach to the Jewish question.

It was a simple case of self-defense, Göring said, without even a mention of the theme of race.

In court, he presented his antisemitism as humdrum, restrained, indistinguishable from that of millions of Germans and others.

After Germany's collapse in 1918, Jewry became very powerful in Germany in all spheres of life, especially in the political, general intellectual, cultural, and, most particularly, economic spheres.

Men came back from the front, had nothing to look forward to, and found a large number of Jews who had come in during the war from Poland and the East holding positions, particularly economic positions.

It is known that under the influence of the war and the businesses concerned with it — demobilization, which offered great possibilities for doing business, inflation, deflation — enormous shifts took place in the propertied classes.