Franz von Papen

German chancellor (1932)

• Born: October 29, 1879
• Birthplace: Werl, Westphalia, Germany
• Died: May 2, 1969
• Place of death: Obersasbach, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany (now in Germany)

After serving six months as German chancellor in 1932, Papen masterminded the backstairs appointment of Adolf Hitler to power on January 30, 1933. In the years that followed, he was the Third Reich’s vice-chancellor and ambassador to Austria (1934-1938) and Turkey (1939-1944).

Early Life

Franz von Papen (PAH-puhn), a child of aristocratic privilege, was the third of five children in a Roman Catholic family that traced its noble ancestry back four centuries. As a younger son with no claim to the family estate, he was guided into a military career by his father, a retired officer. Papen entered Bensberg Cadet School at the age of eleven and culminated his schooling with with three years of training at Gross-Lichterfeld Academy near Berlin, dutifully learning the military discipline and bearing, commitment to national service, and loyalty to the Hohenzollern monarchy that were to shape his political outlook and future. After graduation in 1898, he was posted to his father’s former regiment in Düsseldorf, the Fifth Westphalian Uhlans, as a second lieutenant. There he developed the professional expertise, social graces, and personal contacts essential for a successful military career in imperial Germany.

His marriage in 1905 to Martha von Boch-Galhua, the daughter of a wealthy and influential Saarland industrialist, added important new dimensions to Papen’s life. Besides responsibility for a wife and eventually five children, the marriage brought him into contact with Francophile in-laws who persuaded him to view French culture and Franco-German friendship in a more positive light. His father-in-law’s admiration for the German General Staff also encouraged Papen to seek appointment to this powerful military circle, a goal he realized in 1913 with his promotion to captain.

By prewar standards, Papen’s military career was modestly successful. Peacetime promotion came too slowly for this ambitious young officer, however, and so he used his personal contacts to secure appointment to the German embassy in Washington as military attaché. He was expelled in 1915 for directing anti-Allied espionage and sabotage operations covering the United States and Canada. Much to Papen’s future embarrassment, moreover, check stubs documenting agent payoffs were confiscated from his luggage by British authorities during his return to Germany and reproduced in a British white paper that questioned his personal integrity and respect for international law.

Papen fought with conspicuous courage on the western front in World War I, winning the Iron Cross (First Class) in 1916 while commanding a regiment on the Somme River. Transferred to Turkey in 1917, he served bravely in the Middle Eastern campaign as both a political officer and field commander, attaining the rank of major. With the collapse of the Central Powers in 1918, Papen was forced to return to civilian life in Germany.

Life’s Work

Unable to remain idle for long, Papen turned to politics in 1921, trading in the life of a country gentleman on his Westphalian estate for a seat in the Prussian state diet representing the Catholic Center party. The Westphalian Centrists who recruited him were impressed by Papen’s conservative orientation, agricultural interests, strong Catholic beliefs, independent wealth (inherited mostly from his wife’s family), and influential contacts.

They were less familiar with his political views. An obdurate reactionary, Papen bitterly rejected the new Weimar Republic and parliamentary democracy in favor of the discarded military monarchy of the kaisers. He believed that true political leadership had to come from an experienced ruling elite standing above partisan, interest-oriented parties. In his mind, the fundamental duty of government was not to promote majority rule or social reform but to defend the authoritarian state from the dangers of socialism and Asiatic Bolshevism. Measured even by the standards of conservative Westphalian Centrists, Papen’s views were narrow and extreme.

Yet this extremity was not immediately apparent to party leaders. In the early 1920’s, he worked hard for Centrist causes, especially agricultural issues important to him and his Westphalian constituents. By 1924, however, as his dissatisfaction with the Center Party’s republican ties mounted, Papen turned his energies to separating the Center Party from its socialist and democratic allies and aligning it with the conservative Right. His uncompromising persistence in this crusade gradually alienated party colleagues and cost him his diet seat between 1928 and 1930, and again in 1932.

Exclusion from Center Party politics did not end Papen’s public career. Even as Germany was slipping into the Great Depression, he kept in touch with forces of the Right through private associations such as the Herrenklub in Berlin. To those who would listen, he repeatedly warned of the dangers of communism, urged rapprochement with France something most conservatives eschewed and called for the establishment of an authoritarian dictatorship of the Right. Yet he rarely attracted wider attention in the years between 1928 and 1932.

It thus came as a stunning surprise in June of 1932 when President Paul von Hindenburg, the aging World War I hero, asked Papen to form a national government. In reality, it was not Hindenburg who had picked Papen but General Kurt von Schleicher, a backstairs intriguer who planned to use the little-known Papen as a figurehead chancellor for a cabinet under his command. Papen accepted the offer, noting in his memoirs that he could hardly disobey an order from his wartime commander Hindenburg, a man he deeply admired.

However, Papen’s “cabinet of barons” did little during its six-month tenure to ease Germany’s growing political crisis. The new chancellor negotiated the end of reparations, but neither this nor his reactionary domestic policies produced enough political or popular support to end the parliamentary stalemate paralyzing the German government. Above all, Papen failed to deal decisively with the growing National Socialist movement. Like his predecessor, he was also handicapped by his dependence on presidential emergency powers rather than a Reichstag majority. As Germany’s domestic crisis worsened, Schleicher finally realized that he had misjudged Papen’s usefulness and, over the angry objections of President Hindenburg, brought the Papen government down in December.

In the critical weeks that followed, as Schleicher formed his own government and struggled to cope with the Depression and the Nazis, Papen embarked on a fateful venture that was to bring Adolf Hitler to power. Determined to regain power and repay Schleicher’s disloyalty, he secretly reopened negotiations with Hitler and the Nazis toward the formation of a new government of national concentration. He arduously patched together a coalition of three Nazis and eight non-Nazis headed by Hitler as chancellor and himself as vice-chancellor. Then he convinced the reluctant Hindenburg to accept and support it. In the end it was Papen more than any other person who masterminded Hitler’s legal appointment as German chancellor on January 30, 1933.

Shortly thereafter, Papen predicted that “in two months we’ll have pushed Hitler into a corner so hard he’ll be squeaking.” Yet the new vice-chancellor did not know Hitler as well as he believed. Within weeks all the safeguards he had erected to contain Nazi excesses were brushed aside, and Hitler was wresting absolute power into his own hands. The vice-chancellor and non-Nazi cabinet members were left reeling, often confused or bypassed by the lightning pace of events. Thus the conservative revolution envisioned by Papen actually took place according to the revolutionary precepts of Hitler and the Nazis.

In the tragedy that followed, Papen seemed unable to separate himself from the dictatorship he had helped to install. Because he saw only what he wanted and dismissed Nazi excesses as temporary, he defended Hitler’s coalition throughout the Nazi consolidation of power in 1933-1934. His negotiation of a concordat between Germany and the Vatican in 1933 may even have helped in the process by winning the Catholic Church’s blessing for the Third Reich. Papen did, to be sure, speak out courageously against Nazi illegalities and cruelty on June 17, 1934, at the University of Marburg. Thereafter he kept silent, intimidated perhaps by threats of Brownshirt violence.

Papen claims in his memoirs that he served Hitler and the Third Reich out of a sense of national loyalty, a loyalty instilled in him by his aristocratic origins, military service, and deep Catholic faith. Whatever the reasons, he did publicly represent Nazi Germany for most of its existence. When Hitler offered him the post of ambassador to Austria in 1934, he accepted, working for four years to improve Austro-German relations, strengthen the Austrian Nazis, and prepare the groundwork for the 1938 Anschluss that unified the two countries. When Hitler sent him as ambassador to Turkey in 1939 during the Albanian Crisis, he took up his new duties eagerly, engaging once again as he had earlier in espionage activities. This time, however, his intrigues were more successful, providing Germany with invaluable intelligence on Allied operations in the Middle East.

Captured by U.S. forces at the end of the war, Papen was held for trial at Nuremberg, where he was cleared of all charges by the War Crimes Tribunal. He was subsequently sentenced to eight years’ hard labor by a Bavarian denazification court, but punishment was suspended in 1949. Papen devoted the last years of his life to writing his memoirs, trying unsuccessfully to rehabilitate his reputation, and seeking the pension he believed due him for service in the Prussian army.

Significance

Franz von Papen’s archaic aristocratic creed and reactionary political views remained unchanged throughout his entire life. These, combined with his vanity and lack of political acumen, made it relatively easy for others to use him for their own questionable purposes. His mistake was to believe that he, relying on his social charm and aristocratic standing, could outplay his rivals at their own game. Without the selfish machinations of this short-sighted, devious man, National Socialism might not have found the road to power in 1933. Papen compounded his fateful mistake by refusing to recognize the Third Reich for what it really was: a criminal conspiracy. His myopic support made it easier for other conservatives, aristocrats, and officers to tolerate National Socialism, even when they found certain aspects distasteful. In the end, Papen’s biography demonstrates not only the importance of reactionary monarchists in Hitler’s rise to power but also the susceptibility of people like Papen to political manipulation and expedience.

Bibliography

Blood-Ryan, H. W. Franz von Papen: His Life and Times. London: Rich & Cowan, 1940. One of several contemporary journalistic biographies covering the pre-1940 period. The absence of footnotes and a bibliography, glaring omissions, and the anti-German predisposition make it necessary to use this work with caution.

Dorpalen, Andreas. Hindenburg and the Weimar Republic. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964. Possibly the best general discussion of Papen’s role in 1932 and 1933, especially for his maneuvers to bring Hitler to power at the head of a coalition of the Right. Carefully documented, extremely well written, highly analytical, and accurate.

Jones, Larry Eugene. “Franz von Papen, the German Center Party, and the Failure of Catholic Conservatism in the Weimar Republic.” Central European History 38, no. 2 (2005): 199-217. Analyzes Papen’s role in appointing Adolf Hitler chancellor in 1933 and Papen’s subsequent political career in Nazi Germany.

Papen, Franz von. Memoirs. Translated by Brian Connell. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1953. The most important primary source available on Papen’s life and politics. Filled with inaccuracies, attributable partly to the destruction of Papen’s papers at the end of the war and partly to his notoriously subjective approach, it nevertheless provides a valuable insight into this debonair nobleman’s outlook and life.

Roth, Karl Heinz. “Berlin, Ankara, Baghdad: Franz von Papen and German Near East Policy During the Second World War.” In Germany and the Middle East, 1871-1945, edited by Wolfgang G. Schwanitz. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Weiner, 2004. Analyzes Papen’s diplomatic efforts in the Middle East during World War II.

Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960. Shirer incorporates Papen’s role into a broader history of the Third Reich, focusing appropriately on his role as chancellor, political mediator, and ambassador. In Shirer’s view, this vain and incompetent man was “more responsible than any other individual for Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor.”

Turner, Henry Ashby, Jr. German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Shows convincingly that big business played a far smaller role in Papen’s actions than many historians have believed.

Wheaton, Eliot B. Prelude to Calamity: The Nazi Revolution 1933-35, with a Background Survey of the Weimar Era. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968. Provides a brief analysis of Papen’s role in Nazi politics and assesses him as an amateur who underestimated Hitler.