Career
He helped Adolf Hitler in the writing of Mein Kampf. He was murdered in the Night of the Long Knives. Stempfle entered the priesthood in 1904.
He joined the Hieronymite order in Italy.
In the years leading up to the First World War, he wrote for the Corriere della Sera and various other German and Italian papers. By 1920, he was a leader of the secretive anti-republican Organisation Kanzler (Orka) and by 1923 he was chief editor of the anti-Semitic daily Miesbacher Anzeiger and a leading journalistic figure within the broader volkish-anti-Semitic movement in Catholic Bavaria.
He was also a regular confidant of Hitler. As an increasingly prominent Nazi figure, he was the target of Social Democratic satire and portrayed as the anti-Semitic bishop of Miesbach.
In June 1934, having been deported to the Dachau concentration camp, his body was found in the woods near Harlaching.
His death is attributed by some accounts to a broken neck and by others to shots in the heart "while trying to escape". There is disagreement also over the reasons for his murder. Other accounts hold that it was perhaps his attacks on Christian Weber, for immorality and running a brothel, that determined his fate.