Using Der Stürmer as a Model in Rwanda

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

This is the final of three excerpts from the new book “Justice on the Grass: Three Rwandan Journalists, Their Trial for War Crimes, and a Nation’s Quest for Redemption” (Free Press) by The New York Sun’s associate editor and City Hall bureau chief, Dina Temple-Raston. It will be in book stores March 9.


Just as Hassan Ngeze believed his journalism work was part of a worthy crusade, Nazi editor Julius Streicher saw the creation of his tabloid, Der Stürmer, as a noble endeavor. Der Stürmer, or “The Storm,” was infamous for its anti-Semitism.


For twenty-two years, from 1923 to 1945, Streicher used every issue to denounce Jews with a vitriol that bordered on the insane. And although Streicher had a large staff helping him produce the paper by the 1930s, he was the man in charge.


“Streicher and Stürmer, they are one and the same,” he would say proudly from the dock at Nuremberg. Hassan Ngeze, when he took the stand in Arusha more than fifty years later, sounded a similar refrain. I was in charge, he said. Kangura was mine.


The story went that Streicher chose the name Stürmer while wandering through the woods. “I have it,” he said later. “Since the paper will storm the red fortress, it shall be call the Stürmer.” Experts said later that the story was probably apocryphal. The title he chose was more likely inspired by the Nazi tendency to adopt violent names for its organizations. Other arms of the party were called Der Angriff (“the Attack”) and Die Flamme (“the Flame”). In that group, Der Stürmer would have fit right in. Ngeze’s Kangura (“Wake It Up”) struck a similar, albeit Rwandan, note.


The first issue of Der Stürmer rolled off the presses in May 1923, and from the start it took direct aim at the Jews. “We will be Jewish slaves. Therefore he must go.” In no time at all, Streicher began taking shots at the Jewish mayor of Nuremberg, a fervent anti-Nazi named Hermann Luppe. Streicher used his campaign against Luppe to launch more general attacks on Jews. Der Stürmer wasn’t just a storm, it was a weapon. Streicher’s words were waging a war against the Jews.


Der Stürmer had other eerie parallels with Kangura that, even if the similarities were coincidence, could not have eluded the three judges weighing incitement charges in the Rwanda media trial. There had been, for example, attempts to muzzle the Nazi paper. The director of the German press, Max Amann, had written to Streicher in August 1923 and asked him to stop publishing the newspaper. He was concerned that Streicher could not be controlled and that the Nazi party would not hold sufficient sway over what he published. Prosecutors in the media trial believed that was why Ngeze was jailed so often. Defense attorney John Floyd said Ngeze was thrown in jail because he published articles the Hutu Power movement didn’t like. “He was in jail when the genocide began,” Floyd maintained.


Leafing through the pages of Kangura it was hard not to notice the similarities between the Rwandan broadsheet and its Nazi predecessor. The layout was remarkably similar – all screaming headlines, venomous cartoons, and vindictive captions. They followed a typical tabloid formula. Streicher and Ngeze realized early on that scandal kept readers buying. At first the papers concentrated on political rumors. Streicher accused the mayor of Nuremberg of abuse of power. He blamed the Nuremberg Jewry for any and all problems facing the city, from housing to unemployment. As his readership began to grow outside of Nuremberg he turned to sex and crime, either committed by Jews or waged against Jews. By 1926, what made Der Stürmer renowned was its pornographic content. Young boys picked up the newspaper and hungrily read it for the salacious details.


Ngeze, for his part, blamed all that plagued the Hutu – from poverty to disease – on the Tutsi minority. It was the Tutsi lust for power that time and again sent Rwanda to the precipice of war, he wrote. One of Rwanda’s other newspapers ran a cartoon making fun of Ngeze’s preoccupation. The drawing showed Ngeze on a psychiatrist’s couch and the doctor asking what ailed him. “Tutsi, Tutsi, Tutsi,” Ngeze responded. Ngeze reran the cartoon in his own newspaper in 1992.


Most of Streicher’s material came from readers. They sent letters complaining about neighbors or politicians or family members, and Streicher or his staff followed them up and printed the results. The readership for this kind of gossip and rumor-mongering was made up of precisely the people that the Nazi party was trying to target with its propaganda: the lowest common denominator, the masses who, already aggrieved, were searching for a scapegoat to whom they could affix their problem. The style of the newspaper’s editorial content was tailored to fit the Nazi fashion of the time. The sentences were simple, vocabulary limited. The newspaper was conversational and funny and easy to read. Unlike most newspapers of the time geared toward German intellectuals, Der Stürmer was clearly written for the common man, complete with rough language and repetitive themes. In this way, too, it provided a template for Kangura and Radio Mille Collines.


In December 1925, Streicher hired a cartoonist named Philipp Rupprecht to put pictures to his anti-Jewish message. Drawing under the pen name Fips, Rupprecht provided crude anti-Jewish drawings for the newspaper for more than two decades. The Jews he drew were all the same: short, fat, unshaven, hook-nosed, sexually perverted, and beady-eyed. Each drawing was meant to rob the Jewish people of their humanity. Similarly, unseemly drawings of Tutsi and moderate Hutu found their way into the pages of Ngeze’s Kangura. In one, moderate Hutu politician Faustin Twagiramungu was in bed with Agathe Uwilingiyimana, the prime minister. In – another, General Romeo Dallaire, the head of UNAMIR, the U.N. contingent in Rwanda, was shown sucking the breast of a Tutsi woman. Ngeze, like Streicher before him, was sending a political message under a cloak of titillation.


The question before the tribunal was whether racist talk, hate speech in some of its worst form, rose to the level of genocide. For the first time since World War II, an international court asked judges to decide and draw a line to mark where press freedom ended and incitement began.


“Press freedom comes with responsibility,” Judge Pillay said later. Ngeze, Barayagwiza, and Nahimana were on trial for flouting all the recognized norms of the liberal press. “The press is supposed to hold a position of public trust. It is supposed to maintain a critical distance. They did not.”


The New York Sun

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