He was the founder and publisher of the virulently antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer, which became a central element of the Nazi propaganda machine.

The DSP had been created in May 1919 as an initiative of Rudolf von Sebottendorf as a child of the Thule Society,[12][13] and its program was based on the ideas of the mechanical engineer Alfred Brunner (1881–1936);[14][a] in 1919, the party was officially inaugurated in Hanover.

[13] Its leading members included Hans Georg Müller, Max Sesselmann and Friedrich Wiesel, the first two editors of the Münchner Beobachter.

[14] Streicher sought to move the German Socialists in a more virulently antisemitic direction—an effort which aroused enough opposition that he left the group and brought his now substantial following to yet another organisation in November 1921, the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft (German Working Community, DWG); this group hoped to unite the various antisemitic völkisch movements.

"[17] On 19 September 1922, Streicher left the DWG after less than one year and formally joined the Nazi Party on 8 October (membership number 17).

[26] From the outset, the chief aim of the paper was to promulgate antisemitic propaganda; the first issue had an excerpt that stated, "As long as the Jew is in the German household, we will be Jewish slaves.

"[27] Historian Richard J. Evans describes the newspaper: [Der Stürmer] rapidly established itself as the place where screaming headlines introduced the most rabid attacks on Jews, full of sexual innuendo, racist caricatures, made-up accusations of ritual murder, and titillating, semi-pornographic stories of Jewish men seducing innocent German girls.

[19]In November 1923, Streicher participated in Hitler's first effort to seize power, the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich.

[28] His loyalty to the cause earned him Hitler's lifelong trust and protection; in the years that followed, Streicher would be one of the dictator's few true intimates.

[32] When Hitler was released from his prison sentence at Landsberg am Lech on 20 December 1924 for his role in the Putsch, Streicher was one of the few remaining followers waiting for him at his Munich apartment.

Although Hitler would allow suppression of Der Stürmer at times when it was politically important for the Nazis to be seen as respectable, and although he would admit that Streicher was not a very good administrator, he never withdrew his personal loyalty.

[7] In April 1924, Streicher was elected to the Bavarian Landtag (legislature),[34] a position which gave him a margin of parliamentary immunity – a safety net that would help him resist efforts to silence his racist message.

[35] As a reward for Streicher's loyalty and dedication, on 2 April he was appointed Gauleiter of Nordbayern the Bavarian region that included Upper, Middle and Lower Franconia.

[c] Der Stürmer's official slogan, Die Juden sind unser Unglück (the Jews are our misfortune), was deemed non-actionable under German statutes, since it was not a direct incitement to violence.

[citation needed] Streicher orchestrated his early campaigns against Jews to make the most extreme possible claims, short of violating a law that might get the paper shut down.

He insisted in the pages of his newspaper that the Jews had caused the worldwide Depression, and were responsible for the crippling unemployment and inflation which afflicted Germany during the 1920s.

Real unsolved killings in Germany, especially of children or women, were often confidently explained in the pages of Der Stürmer as cases of "Jewish ritual murder".

[42] His portrayal of Jews as subhuman and evil is considered to have played a critical role in the dehumanization and marginalization of the Jewish minority in the eyes of common Germans – creating the necessary conditions for the later perpetration of the Holocaust.

Hitler declared that Der Stürmer was his favorite newspaper, and saw to it that each weekly issue was posted for public reading in special glassed-in display cases known as "Stürmerkasten".

Late in 1936 Streicher also issued Trust No Fox on his Green Heath and No Jew on his Oath, an infamously anti-Semitic children's picture book by 18 year old Elvira Bauer.

[50] In April 1933, after Nazi control of the German state apparatus gave the Gauleiters enormous power, Streicher organised a one-day boycott of Jewish businesses which was used as a dress-rehearsal for other antisemitic commercial measures.

Streicher's behaviour was viewed as so irresponsible that he was embarrassing the party leadership;[59] chief among his enemies in Hitler's hierarchy was Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who loathed him and later claimed that he forbade his own staff to read Der Stürmer.

He was accused of keeping Jewish property seized after Kristallnacht in November 1938; he was charged with spreading untrue stories about Göring – such as alleging that he was impotent and that his daughter Edda was conceived by artificial insemination; and he was confronted with his excessive personal behaviour, including unconcealed adultery, several furious verbal attacks on other Gauleiters and striding through the streets of Nuremberg cracking a bullwhip.

"[62] On 16 February 1940, he was stripped of his party offices and withdrew from the public eye, although he was permitted to retain the title of a Gauleiter, and to continue publishing Der Stürmer.

[65] Days later, on 23 May 1945, Streicher was captured in the town of Waidring, Austria, by a group of American officers led by Major Henry Plitt of the 101st Airborne Division.

[71] In essence, prosecutors contended that Streicher's articles and speeches were so incendiary that he was an accessory to murder, and therefore as culpable as those who actually ordered the mass extermination of Jews.

The judgment against him read, in part: For his 25 years of speaking, writing and preaching hatred of the Jews, Streicher was widely known as "Jew-Baiter Number One."

He cited the works of Theodore Kaufman, who called for the genocide of Germans by mass sterilization, as justification for his claims about the Jewry's aggression against Germany.

"[77] Joseph Kingsbury-Smith, a journalist for the International News Service who covered the executions,[h] said in his filed report that after the hood descended over Streicher's head, he said "Adele, meine liebe Frau!"

Streicher's body, along with those of the other nine executed men and the corpse of Hermann Göring, was cremated at Ostfriedhof (Munich) and the ashes were scattered in the Isar River.