Von Papen Quotes

As the Nazis continued to lose national elections but increase their share of the vote, the octogenarian president, Paul von Hindenburg, selected as chancellor the bumbling Franz von Papen, who tried to rule through martial authority. When Philipp Frank came to visit him in Caputh that summer, Einstein lamented, “I am convinced that a military regime will not prevent the imminent National Socialist [Nazi] revolution.”13 As

When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, his conservative allies, headed by Deputy Chancellor Franz von Papen, along with those conservative and nationalist leaders who supported von Papen’s Hitler experiment, expected to manage the untrained new head of government without difficulty. They were confident that their university degrees, experience in public affairs, and worldly polish would give them easy superiority over the uncouth Nazis. Chancellor Hitler would spellbind the crowds, they imagined, while Deputy Chancellor von Papen ran the state. Hitler’s conservative allies were not the only ones to suppose that Nazism was a flash in the pan. The Communist International was certain that the German swing to the Right under Hitler would produce a counterswing to the Left as soon as German workers understood that democracy was an illusion and turned away from the reformist social democrats. “The current calm after the victory of Fascism is only temporary. Inevitably, despite Fascist terrorism, the revolutionary tide in Germany will grow. . . . The establishment of open Fascist dictatorship, which is destroying all democratic illusions among the masses and is freeing them from the influence of the Social Democrats, will speed up Germany’s progress toward the proletarian revolution.” Against the expectations of both Right and Left, Hitler quickly established full personal authority. The first period of Nazi rule saw the Gleichschaltung, the bringing into line, not only of potential enemies but also of conservative colleagues. The keys to Hitler’s success were his superior audacity, drive, and tactical agility; his skillful manipulation (as we saw in the previous chapter) of the idea that imminent communist “terror” justified the suspension of due process and the rule of law; and a willingness to commit murder.

Hitler’s electoral success—far greater than Mussolini’s—allowed him more autonomy in bargaining with the political insiders whose help he needed to reach office. Even more than in Italy, as German governmental mechanisms jammed after 1930, responsibility for finding a way out narrowed to a half-dozen men: President Hindenburg, his son Oskar and other intimate advisors, and the last two Weimar chancellors, Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher. At first they tried to keep the uncouth Austrian ex-corporal out. One must recall that in the 1930s cabinet ministers were still supposed to be gentlemen. Bringing raw fascists into government was a measure of their desperation. The Catholic aristocrat Franz von Papen tried as chancellor (July– November 1932) to govern without politicians, through a so-called Cabinet of Barons composed of technical experts and nonpolitical eminences. His gamble at holding national elections in July let the Nazis become the largest party. Von Papen then tried to bring Hitler in as vice chancellor, a position without authority, but the Nazi leader had enough strategic acumen and gambler’s courage to accept nothing but the top office. This path forced Hitler to spend the tense fall of 1932 in an agony of suspenseful waiting, trying to quiet his restless and office-hungry militants while he played for all or nothing. Hoping to deepen the crisis, the Nazis (like the Fascists before them) increased their violence, carefully choosing their targets. The apogee of Nazi street violence in Germany came after June 16, 1932, when Chancellor von Papen lifted the ban on SA uniforms that Brüning had imposed in April. During several sickening weeks, 103 people were killed and hundreds were wounded. Von Papen’s expedient of new elections on November 6 diminished the Nazi vote somewhat (the communists gained again), but did nothing to extract Germany from constitutional deadlock. President Hindenburg replaced him as chancellor on December 2 with a senior army officer regarded as more technocratic than reactionary, General Kurt von Schleicher. During his brief weeks in power (December 1932–January 1933), Schleicher prepared an active job-creation program and mended relations with organized labor. Hoping to obtain Nazi neutrality in parliament, he flirted with Gregor Strasser, head of the party administration and a leader of its anticapitalist current (Hitler never forgot and never forgave Strasser’s “betrayal”). At this point, Hitler was in serious difficulty. In the elections of November 6, his vote had dropped for the first time, costing him his most precious asset—momentum. The party treasury was nearly empty. Gregor Strasser was not the only senior Nazi who, exhausted by Hitler’s all ornothing strategy, was considering other options. The Nazi leader was rescued by Franz von Papen. Bitter at Schleicher for taking his place, von Papen secretly arranged a deal whereby Hitler would be chancellor and he, von Papen, deputy chancellor—a position from which von Papen expected to run things. The aged Hindenburg, convinced by his son and other intimate advisors that Schleicher was planning to depose him and install a military dictatorship, and convinced by von Papen that no other conservative option remained, appointed the Hitler–von Papen government on January 30, 1933. Hitler, concluded Alan Bullock, had been “hoist” into office by “a backstairs conspiracy.

Italian and German conservatives had not created Mussolini and Hitler, of course, though they had too often let their law breaking go unpunished. After the Fascists and the Nazis had made themselves too important to ignore, by the somewhat different mixtures of electoral appeal and violent intimidation that we saw in the last chapter, the conservatives had to decide what to do with them. In particular, conservative leaders had to decide whether to try to coopt fascism or force it back to the margins. One crucial decision was whether the police and the courts would compel the fascists to obey the law. German chancellor Brüning attempted to curb Nazi violence in 1931–32. He banned uniformed actions by the SA on April 14, 1932. When Franz von Papen succeeded Brüning as chancellor in July 1932, however, he lifted the ban, as we saw above, and the Nazis, excited by vindication, set off the most violent period in the whole 1930–32 constitutional crisis. In Italy, although a few prefects tried to restrain Fascist lawlessness, the national leaders preferred, at crucial moments, as we already know, to try to “transform” Mussolini rather than to discipline him. Conservative national leaders in both countries decided that what the fascists had to offer outweighed the disadvantages of allowing these ruffians to capture public space from the Left by violence. The nationalist press and conservative leaders in both countries consistently applied a double standard to judging fascist and left-wing violence.

The Nazis received less direct financial help from business than many have assumed. Before the final deal that put Hitler in power, German big business greatly preferred a solid reassuring conservative like von Papen to the unknown Hitler with his crackpot economic advisors. In the final tense months, when Hitler was refusing all lesser offers in an all-or-nothing gamble on becoming chancellor, and when party radicalism resurfaced in the Berlin transport strike, money grew scarcer. The NSDAP was virtually broke after the disappointing election of November 1932. A relatively minor Cologne banker, Kurt von Schröder, served as go-between in negotiations between Hitler and von Papen, but business contributions did not become a major resource for Hitler until after he attained power. Then, of course, the game changed. Businessmen contributed hugely to the new Nazi authorities and set about accommodating themselves to a regime that would reward many of them richly with armaments contracts, and all of them by breaking the back of organized labor in Germany

Conservative complicities in the fascism’s arrival in power were of several types. First of all, there was complicity in fascist violence against the Left. One of the most fateful decisions in the German case was von Papen’s removal, on June 16, 1932, of the ban on SA activity. Mussolini’s squadristi would have been powerless without the closed eyes and even the outright aid of the Italian police and army. Another form of complicity was the gift of respectability. We have seen how Giolitti helped make Mussolini respectable by including him in his electoral coalition in May 1921. Alfred Hugenberg, Krupp executive and leader of the party that competed with Hitler most directly, the German National Party (DNVP), alternately attacked the Nazi upstart and appeared at political rallies with him. One at Bad Harzburg in fall 1931 made the public believe the two had formed a “Harzburg Front.” But while Hugenberg helped make Hitler look acceptable, his DNVP membership drained away to the more exciting Nazis.

Hitler did not become Reich Chancellor through a victory by his party or by the will of the people, as the term ‘taking power [Machtergreifung]’ might suggest. In the election of 6 November 1932, two-thirds of the voters did not vote for him. It was some influential conservative leaders – including former Chancellors Papen and Schleicher, and Oskar von Hindenburg, son of the Reich President – who thought it would be a clever tactical move to bring Hitler into the coalition in power and thus exercise some restraint over him.