Document Analyst's Report

During March I completed work on the defense documents and corresponding trial transcript for Franz von Papen and the first half of Albert Speer’s documents (reserving comment on Speer until next month). Papen was one of three individual defendants who were acquitted (the others being Hjalmar Schacht and Hans Fritzsche). He became part of the regime without being a Nazi himself; as an aristocratic conservative Catholic politician he negotiated a conservative-Nazi coalition government in January 1933 and became vice-chancellor under Hitler. He assumed the arrangement would stay within constitutional limits, but soon learned better.

The Marburg speech, June 17, 1934: In this speech Papen initially explained why he believed the conservative-Nazi alliance had been necessary. After the trauma of military defeat and its chaotic aftermath, the regime would achieve “the return of all life under the natural laws of creation,” with a Christian religious foundation, an aristocratic social order, and protection of “the private sphere of life.” But the key portion of the speech pointed to the ways that the regime was moving in the opposite direction. The contradiction between professed goals and current measures cast a “mysterious darkness” over public life, and Papen declared that he had to “stand up and call the things by their right names.” Papen lamented the power of “the 150% Nazis” who denied the rights of those who were not party members, the “worship of force,” and the “mistaking of brutality for vitality.”

The aftermath: This was not a safe time to criticize the regime. The government prevented publication of the speech on a large scale. A judge who kept a copy of it in his office was punished with a demotion. Then at the end of the month Hitler conducted his Blood Purge of Ernst Roehm and other leaders of the Storm Troops (SA). While Roehm was considered a left-winger (allied with socialist-minded workers), dissidents from the other ideological wing were also targeted. Goering put Papen under house arrest for several days, and two of his associates were killed. Papen resigned as vice-chancellor.

Papen served as ambassador to Austria for several years, proposing a subsidy to the Austrian Freedom Union in 1936 to support “the fight against Jewry,” but he was not involved in the military occupation of 1938. During the war he was the German ambassador in Turkey and reportedly made diplomatic overtures to Americans and the Swedish king seeking a negotiated peace.

An endorsement from the grave: One of Papen’s aristocratic colleagues supplied evidence that in late 1943 Claus von Stauffenberg, Hitler’s would-be assassin in the July 20 1944 plot, had declared that Papen should conduct Germany’s negotiations with the Allies after the coup. When Papen needed to demonstrate his distance from Hitler, nothing could be better evidence than Stauffenberg’s confidence in him.

Matt Seccombe, 1 April 2024