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 politician, diplomat, army officer, and Prussian nobleman. A national conservative, he served as Chancellor of Germany in 1932, and then as Vice-Chancellor under Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1934. A committed monarchist, Papen is largely remembered for his role in bringing Hitler to power.

Born into a wealthy and powerful family of Westphalian Catholic aristocrats, Papen served in the Prussian Army from 1898 onward and was trained as an officer of the German General Staff. He served as a 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, and dissolved the Reichstag twice under his short tenure. His failure to secure a base of support in the Reichstag led to his removal by Hindenburg and replacement by his former ally, General Kurt von Schleicher.

Determined to return to power at all costs, Papen, naively believing that Adolf Hitler could be reined-in once he was in government, and catastrophically underestimating Hitler's political skill and ruthlessness, pressured Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor and himself as vice-chancellor in 1933, in a cabinet ostensibly not under Nazi Party domination. Viewing military dictatorship as the sole 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 placed him under house arrest, ransacked his office and murdered some of his close associates.

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. During his tenure as the Austrian ambassador, he assisted in the handover of Austria to Germany (Anschluss) by convincing Kurt von Schuschnigg, the then-Austrian Chancellor, to sign Austria's sovereignty away to Nazi Germany, on Feb. 12, 1938.

After World War II, 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 and hard labor, but was released on appeal in 1949. In his memoirs, such as the Der Wahrheit eine Gasse (Giving Truth a Chance), published in 1952, he insistently downplayed his involvement and portrayed himself as a tragic patriot; he died in 1969. Modern historians generally view Franz von Papen to be an unscrupulous figure.