The Second World War ended in Europe on May 8th, 1945.
6 years, 70 million dead.
An entire civilization burned down and rebuilt in rubble.
He walked into that room screaming, “Hile Hitler!” He looked the executioner in the eye and smiled.
He called out for his wife in a whisper so quiet only one journalist in the room heard it.
And then the trapoor dropped.
This is the story of Julia Straker.
Hitler’s longtime friend and the vicious voice of Nazi propaganda whom Hitler cherished and shielded despite scandals and party infighting.
October 16th, 1946, 200 a.m.

Nuremberg Prison Gymnasium, Germany.
The war ended 17 months ago, but this night, this specific 2:00 a.m., is when the Allied powers have decided the final chapter gets written.
10 men, 10 nooses, one gymnasium.
One by one, they’re walking through a curtain doorway.
They don’t come back.
Some of the most powerful people in human history, generals, ministers, ye ideologists, are being reduced to body bags on stretchers, their feet sticking out from under army blankets.
The whole thing is supposed to take about 2 hours.
It doesn’t go as planned.
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Julius Striker was not a general.
He never commanded a single soldier.
He was a school teacher turned newspaper editor.
And that combination, education plus propaganda, made him more dangerous than most men who ever held a rifle.
In 1923, he founded Deurma, the attacker, a weekly newspaper that didn’t report news.
It manufactured hatred every single week for over two decades.
It printed anti-semitic caricatures, false accusations, and racial slander.
Posted in public display cases on street corners across Germany so that even people who never bought a copy couldn’t escape it.
At its peak, half a million copies per week.
Think about what that means.
Half a million households receiving this paper.
Children growing up with these images.
Teachers using it in classrooms.
By the time the death camps opened, Striker had spent 15 years preparing German society to look the other way.
The Nuremberg Tribunal made a landmark decision because of him.
Incitement is not separate from the crime.
Incitement is the crime.
He never pulled a trigger.
He just kept printing.
Now, here is where this story becomes something different from a history lesson.
Because we don’t have to imagine what happened that night.
We have a firsthand account, a realtime journalist’s report filed hours after the execution that reads like something between a court document and a horror story.
His name was Joseph Kingsbury Smith.
He was a reporter for the international news service chosen by lottery to represent the American press.
We hei was one of the only journalists in that gymnasium.
And what he wrote that night is one of the most important pieces of historical journalism in the 20th century.
He didn’t editorialize.
He didn’t dramatize.
He just described with cold exact detail what he saw.
And what he saw was not what was supposed to happen.
Before we get to Striker’s final moments, you need to understand the man holding the rope.
Master Sergeant John C.
Woods, US Army executioner.
Was this man qualified? You The answer backed by military records and eyewitness testimony is probably not.
Woods later claimed he had personally executed 347 people before Nuremberg.
That number has never been verified.
Military investigators found his claimed experience difficult to substantiate.
More importantly, proper hanging requires precise calculation.
The drop length must be calibrated to the prisoner’s weight and height.
Because a correct drop breaks the neck instantly.
A drop that’s too short means the condemned person doesn’t die from a broken neck.
They strangle slowly, consciously for minutes.
At Nuremberg, Woods used the shorter standard drop instead of the longer British method.
The result, multiple executions that night took between 14 and 28 minutes.
Was it incompetence? Was it deliberate? That question has never been fully answered, and it sits at the center of every serious analysis of that night.
Now, 2:12 a.m., Julia Striker is brought in.
Here’s what Kingsbury Smith wrote, and I want you to feel how different this is from every other man who walked in that night.
As the guards stopped him at the bottom of the steps for the identification formality, he uttered a piercing scream.
Hile Hitler.
The shriek sent a shiver down my back.
A shiver down the back of a man who had been watching executions for over an hour.
That tells you something.
Well, the colonel present ordered the interpreter to ask Striker his name.
Standard identification procedure.
Striker shouted back, “You know my name.” “Well,” they asked again.
He screamed, “Julia Striker.” As he reached to the platform, he called out, “Now it goes to God.” Then, facing the witnesses, he screamed one final cryptic phrase, “Purimfest, 1946.
Purim, the Jewish holiday that commemorates the execution of Hmon, an ancient Persian official who had tried to exterminate the Jewish people.
He was drawing a parallel between himself and that ancient villain, and suggesting the same fate awaited those watching him die.
It was historically delusional.
It was also, in a deeply disturbing way, his last act of propaganda.
Then the American officer asked, “Does the condemned man have any last words?” Striker turned to the witnesses and shouted, “The Bolsheviks will hang you one day.
The hood came down.” And then, just before the trap door, Kingsbury Smith heard something that changed everything.
A muffled whisper from inside the hood.
“Adell, minor liberafra.
Adele, my dear wife.” The trap opened with a loud bang.
He went down kicking.
This is where the story gets complicated.
And this is where Kingsbury Smith’s report becomes genuinely uncomfortable to read because Smith didn’t just describe what happened above the trap door.
He described what he believed happened below it.
You, According to Smith and other witnesses present that night, after Striker dropped the curtain moved, and then Woods, the executioner, went behind that curtain.
Smith and the other witnesses became convinced that Woods had grabbed Striker and pulled down hard, manually strangling him rather than letting the rope do its job.
Lieutenant Stanley Tills, who was responsible for coordinating the hangings.
You later stated that Woods had deliberately placed the coils of Striker’s noose off center, meaning Striker would not experience a clean quick death.
Smith himself believed that Woods hated Germans, and he described seeing a small smile cross his lips as he pulled the hangman’s handle.
An official medical inspection of the process was, in the words of those present, said to have revealed a shambles.
Now, pause.
I have a question for you.
Was this justice or was this something else? Here’s the uncomfortable truth that serious historians debate.
The Nuremberg trials were a landmark in international law.
They established that war crimes and crimes against humanity could be prosecuted.
They created the framework for every international tribunal that has existed since.
But the executions themselves, they were messy.
They were arguably cruel.
And Striker’s execution specifically carries questions that have never been cleanly resolved.
You consider this.
The Allied powers had just spent months arguing in a court of law that civilization must be governed by rules.
That no man, no matter what he did, can be punished outside the bounds of law.
The entire point of Nuremberg was that rule of law must replace revenge.
And then, if the eyewitness accounts are accurate, the man they hired to carry out that law manually strangled a prisoner behind a curtain.
Was Striker a monster? Absolutely.
Does he deserve sympathy? No.
When the people enforcing justice start bending the rules, even against the worst people alive, what does that do to the justice itself? There’s no clean answer, only an honest one.
Nuremberg was the best system humanity had ever built for this situation.
And it still had cracks.
The cracks matter because every future tribunal was built on the same foundation.
But let’s come back to that whisper because I keep thinking about it.
Adele, my dear wife, Julius Striker, the man who had spent 23 years publishing the psychological groundwork for genocide, spent his last conscious second on earth calling for the woman he loved.
That’s not a redemption.
That’s not a twist.
That’s not something that softens what he did.
But it’s the most humanly disturbing detail in this entire story because it forces you to confront something that comfortable history never makes you face.
The worst people who ever lived were still people when they still loved someone.
They still felt fear.
They still in the last second reached for something human.
That’s not a reason to forgive Julius Striker.
His newspaper helped make the Holocaust thinkable for millions of ordinary Germans.
Words have consequences.
His words had the worst consequences in modern history.
But understanding how a school teacher becomes a war criminal, how a man with a wife and a newspaper and a cause becomes someone condemned at Nuremberg, that is the most important question history can ask.
Because it doesn’t start with monsters.
It starts with choices.
Small ones, then bigger ones, then ones you can’t take back.
Julius Striker was pronounced dead in the early hours of October 16th, 1946.
His ashes yolong with the other executed men were scattered in a river deliberately so that no grave could ever become a shrine.
Durma had printed its last issue months earlier, but Kingsbury Smith’s report filed that same morning from a gymnasium in Nuremberg is still available to read in full.
No dramatization, no editing, just the account of a journalist in a room watching history decide it was finished with 10 men.
He described Striker’s entrance, the scream, the whisper on the trap.
And then, in the measured, exhausted tone of a man who had been standing in that room for two hours, he moved on to the next name on the list, because that’s what that night was.
A list, 10 names, 10 traps, one gymnasium, and one executioner with a smile on his face and questions that would follow him for the rest of his life.
Drop a comment below.
Do you think what happened under that curtain was justice? Or did it cross a line? I want to know what you think.
And if this video gave you something to think about, share it.
History doesn’t change, but understanding it does.
We uploads every week.
See you in the next dark room.
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