The Deutsche Zeitung, which for several months stirred up a hornet’s nest of agitation with its pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic articles, announced yesterday that it has decided to suspend publication.
Stripped of its prejudicial effectiveness by a libel suit which forced W. L. McLaughlin, its managing editor and part-publisher, to abandon his tirades against the Jews rather than spend a year in Jail, the newspaper lost its reason for existence when the Friends of New Germany disowned it as the official Nazi mouthpiece in this country.
Its successor in the racial discrimination field is the Deutscher Beobachter, published by the “Friends” and edited principally by ex-members of the Zeitung staff, who walked out when McLaughlin printed a retraction of libelous statements he had made against former Magistrate Joseph Goldstein and announced the entire policy of the Zeitung would be altered.
The Beobachter news staff, Dr. Hubert Schnuch, national president of the Friends, declared yesterday, is to be headed by Adolf Haag, former Deutsche. Zeitung reporter and one-time member of the force of the Staats Zeitung. Haag will bear the title of “responsible editor.”
Walter Kappe, whose apology to Dr. Kurt Rosenfeld, fugitive from Nazi Germany and former Prussian Minister of Justice, evoked many chuckles because he had voiced scathing criticism of McLaughlin’s “lack of courage,” is not to be connected with the Beobachter, Schnuch said.
Instead Kappe now becomes an official of the “Friends,” serving as its press representative. This, Dr. Schnuch hastened to explain, does not mean that Louis Zahne loses his status as publicity agent for the Nazi organization, but merely that Kappe will be the immediate contact man between the “Friends” and the Beobachter, in whose offices, at 305 East Forty-sixth street, he will make his headquarters.
Convinced that the Beobachter will find a reading public as least as receptive as did the now defunct Deutsche Zeitung, the “Friends” have bought machinery for a plant, now being installed at the East Forty-sixth street address. The newspaper will be issued twice weekly, on Tuesday and Friday evenings, with an English section on the latter day.
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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.