National Socialist headquarters in Munich today officially confirmed rumors that Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s right hand man, chief Nazi publicist and head of the Berlin section of the party, has been compelled to resign from this latter position. The press here sees in this resignation a sign of another serious conflict in the Hitlerite camp.
Last April, after Dr. Goebbels had been fined three successive times for anti-Semitic libels, it was reported that Hitler, weary of his lieutenant’s unrestrained rhetorical talents, intended to oust him from the leadership of the Berlin section of the Nazi movement. It was Goebbels, more radical even than his chieftain, who led the dramatic march of the Nazi deputies out of a hectic session of the Reichstag in February.
If the resignation of Goebbels means a split in the Hitlerite camp it is not the first. Last April, simultaneously with the downfall of Dr. Wilhelm Frick, the notorious Fascist minister of the interior and education of Thuringia, an open revolt flared up in the National Socialist party against Hitler. The rebellion arose from Hitler’s effort to dissolve the Berlin storm squads, the praetorian guard of the Nazi movement, whose task it has been to prevent their party meetings from being broken up by Communists, and to oust their leader, Captain Stennes, for insubordination.
Hitler’s attempt to supplant Stennes with Lieutenant Paul Schulz, resulted in the desertion of 30,000 members of the storm squads who joined Stennes who occupied the Berlin headquarters of the party, established his own paper and created a rump Nazi party. Goebbels, who had been considered Hitler’s chief rival, sided with Hitler who empowered him to clean up the situation in Berlin.
As the joint leader of the Nazi frection in the Reichstag and as an orator rivalling, if not surpassing Hitler himself as a popular speaker, Goebbels has been more radical than Hitler. Hardly a month passed in which Goebbels has not found himself in court on a charge of libel. The Berlin police, and especially the vice-commandant, Dr. Bernard Weiss, have been his chief targets. He was also the center of a sensational case involving President von Hindenburg.
Goebbels’ outpourings have appeared chiefly in the Berlin Nazi organ, the Angriff. In his attack on von Hindenburg he charged Hindenburg with doing what his “Jewish advisors” told him to do. Accompanying the article was a caricature in which Hindenburg was pictured as the German godfather who, adorned with a Jewish emblem, permits the enslaved German people to be defiled.
Shortly after the sensational Nazi anti-Jewish attacks in Berlin last October, simultaneously with the opening of the Rechstag, Hitler accused Goebbels of being responsible for the outbreak. He made the accusation at a caucus of the Nazi members of the Reichstag. Goebbels defended himself by pointing out that true National Socialists do not agree with Hitler’s reserved tactics of party management.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
