Der Stürmer

The first issue appeared in Nuremberg on 20 April 1923. The last known issue is dated 22 February 1945; since it carries no notice of closure or farewell to readers, historians allow that later issues may have appeared. Streicher kept editorial control to the end, with Ernst Hiemer and Karl Holz among the editors. From 1932 the paper carried the subtitle "German weekly in the struggle for truth".

The historian A. M. Ermakov distinguishes two strands of antisemitism in Nazi Germany. The "intellectual" strand, aimed at the educated and the technocratic elite, was embodied by the SS weekly Das Schwarze Korps, founded in 1935; the "vulgar" strand, aimed at "ordinary" Germans and indifferent to plausible argument or accurate facts, by Der Stürmer. Having almost no correspondents of its own, the paper asked readers for news from 1923; readers' letters became a regular column in 1924, renamed the "Letter Box" in 1926, and from 1937 "At the Pillory" denounced Germans who kept company with Jews. Dialogue with readers became the paper's hallmark.

Exact circulation figures are unknown. Figures Streicher gave at Nuremberg and other sources put it at 14,000 in 1927 and 25,000 in 1933, and a document his defence submitted to the tribunal shows a jump from 113,800 in January 1935 to 486,000 that October. The International Military Tribunal estimated 700,000 copies a week for 1935–1939, and party rally special issues exceeded two million. Thousands of public display cases at tram stops, factory canteens and similar places put the paper before people who did not buy it. From 1936 the Stürmer press also published antisemitic picture books such as The Poisonous Mushroom (1938). The Weimar Republic banned the paper briefly in 1931, and even under the Nazi regime Goebbels banned it indefinitely on Hitler's orders in 1938 before soon lifting the ban.

The Paris exile daily Pariser Tageblatt warned of the paper's national spread in 1935 and attacked Streicher and Der Stürmer in 188 articles in 1934–1939; its journalists seldom named the paper without the epithets "gutter", "pornographic" or "inflammatory". When the war came the paper sold subscriptions for soldiers at the front, and soldiers who entered Poland and the Soviet Union sent in a flood of letters about the "Eastern Jews". Ermakov concludes that these letters show soldiers not only receiving antisemitic propaganda but producing it. Streicher was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and executed in 1946.