Franz von Papen
Franz Joseph Hermann Michael Maria von Papen, Erbsälzer zu Werl und Neuwerk (German: [ˈfʁants fɔn ˈpaːpn̩] ; 29 October 1879 – 2 May 1969) was a German national conservative, diplomat, Prussian nobleman and General Staff officer. He served as the chancellor of Germany in 1932, and then as the vice-chancellor under Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1934. Papen is largely remembered for his role in bringing Hitler to power.
Franz von Papen
Wilhelm Haas (1952)
Adolf Hitler
Carl-Hermann Mueller-Graaf (1952)
Adolf Hitler
Franz Blücher (1949 as Vice-Chancellor of West Germany)
Kurt von Schleicher
Kurt von Schleicher
29 October 1879
Werl, Prussia, German Empire
2 May 1969 (aged 89)
Sasbach, West Germany
Wallerfangen, Germany
Centre Party (1918–1932)
Independent (1932–1938)
Nazi Party (NSDAP; 1938–1945)
5
1898–1919
Born into a wealthy family of Westphalian Catholic aristocrats, Papen served in the Prussian Army from 1898 onward and was trained as a German General Staff officer. He served as military attaché in Mexico and the United States from 1913 to 1915, while also covertly organising acts of sabotage in the United States and quietly backing and financing Mexican forces in the Mexican Revolution on behalf of German military intelligence.
After being expelled as persona non grata by the United States State Department in 1915, he served as a battalion commander on the Western Front of World War I and finished his war service in the Middle Eastern theatre as a lieutenant colonel.
Asked to become chancellor of the Weimar Republic by President Paul von Hindenburg in 1932, Papen ruled by presidential decree. He launched the Preußenschlag coup against the Social Democratic Party-led Government in the Free State of Prussia. His failure to secure a base of support in the Reichstag led to his removal by Hindenburg and replacement by General Kurt von Schleicher.
Determined to return to power, Papen, believing that Adolf Hitler could be controlled once he was in the government, pressured Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor and Papen as vice-chancellor in 1933 in a cabinet ostensibly not under Nazi Party domination. Seeing military dictatorship as the only alternative to a Nazi Party chancellor, Hindenburg consented. Papen and his allies were quickly marginalized by Hitler and he left the government after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, during which the Nazis killed some of his allies and confidants. Subsequently, Papen served the German Foreign Office as the ambassador in Vienna from 1934 to 1938 and in Ankara from 1939 to 1944. He joined the Nazi Party in 1938.
After the Second World War, Papen was indicted for Nazi war crimes in the Nuremberg trials before the International Military Tribunal but was acquitted of all charges. In 1947, a West German denazification court found Papen to have acted as the main culprit in crimes relating to the Nazi government. Papen was given a sentence of eight years' imprisonment at hard labour, but was released on appeal in 1949. Franz von Papen's memoirs were published in 1952 and 1953; he died in 1969.
Early life and education[edit]
Papen was born into a wealthy and noble Catholic family in Werl, Westphalia, the third child of Friedrich von Papen-Köningen (1839–1906) and his wife Anna Laura von Steffens (1852–1939).[1]
Papen was sent to a cadet school in Bensberg of his own volition at the age of 11 in 1891. His four years there were followed by three years of training at the Preußische Hauptkadettenanstalt in Lichterfelde. He was trained as a Herrenreiter ("gentleman rider").[1] He served for a period as a military attendant in the Kaiser's Palace and as a second lieutenant in his father's old unit, the Westphalian Uhlan Regiment No. 5 in Düsseldorf. Papen joined the German General Staff as a captain in March 1913.
He married Martha von Boch-Galhau (1880–1961) on 3 May 1905. Papen's wife was the daughter of a wealthy Saarland industrialist whose dowry made him a very rich man.[2] An excellent horseman and a man of much charm, Papen cut a dashing figure and during this time, befriended Kurt von Schleicher.[2] Papen was proud of his family's having been granted hereditary rights since 1298 to mine brine salt at Werl. He always believed in the superiority of the aristocracy over commoners.[3] Fluent in both French and English, he travelled widely all over Europe, the Middle East and North America.[2] He was devoted to Kaiser Wilhelm II.[4] Influenced by the books of General Friedrich von Bernhardi, Papen was a militarist throughout his life.[4]
Army service in World War I[edit]
As a Catholic, Papen belonged to the Centre Party, the centrist party that almost all German Catholics supported, but during the course of the war, the nationalist conservative Papen became estranged from his party.[19] Papen disapproved of Matthias Erzberger's cooperation with Social Democrats, and regarded the Reichstag Peace Resolution of 19 July 1917 as almost treason.[19]
Later in World War I, Papen returned to the army on active service, at first on the Western Front. In 1916 Papen took command of the 2nd Battalion of the 93rd Reserve Infantry Regiment of the 4th Guards Infantry Division fighting in Flanders.[20] On 22 August 1916, Papen's battalion took heavy losses while successfully resisting a British attack during the Battle of the Somme.[21] Between November 1916 – February 1917, Papen's battalion was engaged in almost continuous heavy fighting.[22] He was awarded the Iron Cross, 1st Class. On 11 April 1917, Papen fought at Vimy Ridge, where his battalion was defeated with heavy losses by the Canadian Corps.[22]
After Vimy, Papen asked for a transfer to the Middle East, which was approved.[22] From June 1917 Papen served as an officer on the General Staff in the Middle East, and then as an officer attached to the Ottoman army in Palestine.[22][23] During his time in Constantinople, Papen befriended Joachim von Ribbentrop. Between October–December 1917, Papen took part in the heavy fighting in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign.[24] He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel.
After the Turks signed an armistice with the Allies on 30 October 1918, the German Asia Corps was ordered home, and Papen was in the mountains at Karapinar when he heard on 11 November 1918 that the war was over.[24] The new republic ordered soldiers' councils to be organised in the German Army, including the Asian corps, which General Otto Liman von Sanders attempted to obey, and which Papen refused to obey.[25] Sanders ordered Papen arrested for his insubordination, which caused Papen to leave his post without permission as he fled to Germany in civilian clothing to personally meet Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who had the charges dropped.[26]
Ambassador to Turkey[edit]
Papen later served the German government as Ambassador to Turkey from 1939 to 1944. In April 1938, after the retirement of the previous ambassador, Frederich von Keller on his 65th birthday, the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop attempted to appoint Papen as ambassador in Ankara, but the appointment was vetoed by the Turkish president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who remembered Papen well with considerable distaste when he had served alongside him in World War I.[133] In November 1938 and in February 1939, the new Turkish president General İsmet İnönü again vetoed Ribbentrop's attempts to have Papen appointed as German ambassador to Turkey.[134] In April 1939, Turkey accepted Papen as ambassador.[134] Papen was keen to return to Turkey, where he had served during World War I.[135]
Papen arrived in Turkey on 27 April 1939, just after the signing of a UK-Turkish declaration of friendship.[136] İnönü wanted Turkey to join the UK-inspired "peace front" that was meant to stop Germany.[137] On 24 June 1939, France and Turkey signed a declaration committing them to upholding collective security in the Balkans.[138] On 21 August 1939, Papen presented Turkey with a diplomatic note threatening economic sanctions and the cancellation of all arms contracts if Turkey did not cease leaning towards joining the UK-French "peace front", a threat that Turkey rebuffed.[139]
On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and two days later on 3 September 1939 the UK and France declared war on Germany.[140] Papen claimed later to have been opposed to Hitler's foreign policy in 1939, and was very depressed when he heard the news of the German attack on Poland on the radio.[140] Papen continued his work of representing the Reich in Turkey under the grounds that resigning in protest "would indicate the moral weakening in Germany", which was something he could never do.[140]
On 19 October 1939, Papen suffered a notable setback when Turkey signed a treaty of alliance with France and the UK.[141] During the Phoney War, the conservative Catholic Papen found himself to his own discomfort working together with Soviet diplomats in Ankara to pressure Turkey not to enter the war on the Allied side.[142] In June 1940, with France's defeat, İnönü abandoned his pro-Allied neutrality, and Papen's influence in Ankara dramatically increased.[143]
Between 1940 and 1942 Papen signed three economic agreements that placed Turkey in the German economic sphere of influence.[144] Papen hinted more than once to Turkey that Germany was prepared to support Bulgarian claims to Thrace if Turkey did not prove more accommodating to Germany.[145] In May 1941, when the Germans dispatched an expeditionary force to Iraq to fight against the UK in the Anglo-Iraqi War, Papen persuaded Turkey to allow arms in Syria to be shipped along a railroad linking Syria to Iraq.[146] In June 1941, Papen successfully negotiated a Treaty of Friendship and Non-aggression with Turkey, signed on 17 June 1941, which prevented Turkey from entering the war on the Allied side.[147] After Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union that began on 22 June 1941, Papen persuaded Turkey to close the Turkish straits to Soviet warships, but was unable to have the straits closed to Soviet merchant ships as he demanded.[148]
Papen claimed after the war to have done everything within his power to save Turkish Jews living in countries occupied by Germany from deportation to the death camps, but an examination of the Auswärtige Amt's records does not support him.[149] During the war, Papen used his connections with Turkish Army officers with whom he served in World War I to try to influence Turkey into joining the Axis, held parties at the German embassy which were attended by leading Turkish politicians and used "special funds" to bribe Turks into following a pro-German line.[150] As an ambassador to Turkey, Papen survived a Soviet assassination attempt on 24 February 1942 by agents from the NKVD:[151] a bomb exploded prematurely, killing the bomber and no one else, although Papen was slightly injured. In 1943, Papen frustrated a UK attempt to have Turkey join the war on the Allied side by getting Hitler to send a letter to Inönü assuring him that Germany had no interest in invading Turkey and by threatening to have the Luftwaffe bomb Istanbul if Turkey joined the Allies.[152]
In the summer and fall of 1943, realizing the war was lost, Papen attended secret meetings with the agents of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Istanbul.[153] Papen exaggerated his power in Germany to the OSS, and asked for US support to make him dictator of a post-Hitler Germany.[153] US President Franklin D. Roosevelt rejected the offer when he heard of it and told the OSS to stop talking to Papen.[154] From October 1943, Papen and the German embassy gained access to the "Cicero" documents of secret agent Elyesa Bazna, including information and the Tehran Conference, which Papen revealed selectively to Inönu to strain Allied-Turkish relations.[155][156] In January 1944, Papen, after learning via the "Cicero" documents of a UK plan to have the Royal Air Force use airfields in Turkey to bomb the oil fields of Ploiești in Romania, told the Turkish foreign minister Hüseyin Numan Menemencioğlu that if Turkey allowed the RAF to use Turkish air fields to bomb Ploiești, the Luftwaffe would use its bases in Bulgaria and Greece to bomb and destroy Istanbul and Izmir.[157]
On 20 April 1944, Turkey, wishing to ingratiate itself with the Allies, ceased selling chromium to Germany.[158] On 26 May 1944 Menemencioğlu announced that Turkey was reducing exports to Germany by 50%, and on 2 August 1944 Turkey severed diplomatic relations with Germany, forcing Papen to return to Berlin.[159] After Pope Pius XI died in February 1939, his successor Pope Pius XII did not renew Papen's honorary title of Papal chamberlain. As nuncio, the future Pope John XXIII, Angelo Roncalli, became acquainted with Papen in Greece and Turkey during World War II. The German government considered appointing Papen ambassador to the Holy See, but Pope Pius XII, after consulting Konrad von Preysing, Bishop of Berlin, rejected this proposal. In August 1944, Papen had his last meeting with Hitler after arriving back in Germany from Turkey. Here, Hitler awarded Papen the Knight's Cross of the War Merit Cross.[160] In September 1944, Papen settled at his estate at Wallerfangen in the Saarland that had been given to him by his father-in-law.[161] On 29 November 1944, Papen could hear in the distance the guns of the advancing US Third Army, which caused him and his family to flee deeper into Germany.[162]