The Accidental Birth of Hate Crime in Transnational Criminal Law: 'Discrepancies' in the Prosecution for "Incitement to Genocide" during the Nuremberg Process

Abstract

This case study of Julius Streicher’s prosecution at Nuremberg aims to explore one element of the various contingencies through which individuals responsible, to various degrees, for promoting expressions of racist hate speech have been subjected to markedly different types of legal responses within the landmark Nuremberg trials programme. These contingencies, together with loose judicial reasoning and indeterminacies in the meaning(s) of international criminal law doctrines, complicate scholarly efforts to identify the historical emergence of this type of transnational hate crime. They also illustrate the complications that arise when seeking to ascertain the implications of the Streicher, and other related case studies, as precedents