Bernhard Stempfle joined the Roman Catholic order of the Hieronymites as a young man and lived in Rome as a priest of this community for an extended period of time. It was not until August 1914 that he returned to his home town, where he was registered as a writer and editor from then on.
There is a great deal of misinformation in the literature regarding his academic career: this is presumably because after returning from Rome, Stempfle signed his letters, articles and manuscripts ‘Professor’, even though no details of a subject, place of study or degree are known. He did not complete a degree, at least not at the University of Munich (LMU), nor did he receive his doctorate there. Furthermore, he was never a lecturer at LMU, let alone a university professor.
Immediately after the revolution of 1918/1919, Stempfle appeared on the ethnic-chauvinist nationalist scene as an avowed antisemite, publishing numerous articles under the pseudonyms ‘Redivivus’ and ‘Spectator Germaniae’ in the Münchener Beobachter – which not long afterwards became the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party newspaper – as well as in the Oberbayerische Landeszeitung and other newspapers. From February 1920 to June 1921 he was press officer for the politically far-right organization Kanzler (ORKA), which emerged from the citizens’ militias, and he was editor-in-chief and political correspondent of the antisemitic incitement newspaper Miesbacher Anzeiger from August 1922 to the end of 1925.
As a publicist in Munich in the early 1920s, Stempfle had various contacts with extreme right-wing, ethnic-chauvinist and National Socialist groups and individuals, and this was how he came to meet the young Adolf Hitler, probably through the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann.
Stempfle was one of the observers of the Hitler trial and among the first to review Hitler’s book Mein Kampf. His highly critical review appeared in several parts from July 29, 1925 onwards in the Miesbacher Anzeiger – one of the reasons why the widespread claim that Stempfle was involved in the drafting of Mein Kampf is inaccurate. Stempfle was ambivalent about the Nazi Party: while he supported the nationalist and antisemitic parts of Nazi ideology, he emphatically rejected other elements such as the party’s attitude towards Italy and the South Tyrol issue. He was also in favor of the monarchy as the preferred form of government. His personal relationship with Hitler was strained for a long time.
From the end of 1925 Stempfle was employed at the so-called ‘Rehse Collection’: this was a collection of contemporary historical documents and relics, in particular relating to the early history of the Nazi Party, which had been initiated by photographer and art publisher F.J.M. Rehse in 1914. The collection was housed in the office of the Nazi Party on Munich’s Schellingstraße.
Stempfle remained an employee of the ‘Rehse Collection’ after its acquisition by the Nazi Party in 1929. In the years that followed he wrote various manuscripts of just a few pages, most of which were rather insubstantial, covering a wide variety of topics such as ‘The journalist and the guillotine’, ‘Marriage as a life insurance institution’ and ‘The forerunner of the Zeppelin’.
In 1932 he wrote what was probably his longest manuscript (23 pages) on the subject ‘Adolf Hitler as a foreigner’, concluding: “The gates were opened to foreigners and closed to Germans living abroad. (...) In practice, the front-line soldier Hitler receives worse treatment than the Jewish scrounger (...). Apart from the Social Democrats, it was above all the Center Party and its press that fought tooth and nail against considering Hitler a German citizen.”
Having joined the Nazi Party in 1934, Stempfle was arrested on the evening of July 1, 1934 in connection with the Röhm Affair in his Munich apartment, where he had been living as a subtenant since July 10, 1933, and was sent to Dachau Concentration Camp . There he was “shot by summary execution in connection with the purge” – as the Bavarian Political Police informed his sister in response to the missing person’s report submitted by her on July 19, 1934. The exact date of his death is not known.
Researchers disagree on the motives behind Stempfle’s killing: one theory is that he was killed at Hitler’s instigation because he knew too much compromising information about Hitler’s past and private life, while according to another, Stempfle was the victim of a misunderstanding and Hitler had not actually ordered him to be murdered at all. Yet another theory is that Munich Nazi Party city councilor Christian Weber was responsible, taking the opportunity of the wave of murders on June 30, 1934 to settle a personal score with Stempfle, since Stempfle had attacked Weber in previous years for his dissolute lifestyle.
