Franz von Papen
Franz von Papen was the Catholic aristocrat and cavalry officer whom Hindenburg made chancellor in June 1932 with a cabinet of barons and no party behind him, who was pushed out in December by his own defence minister, and who then, wanting back in, arranged the deal that made Hitler chancellor on 30 January 1933 with himself as vice-chancellor, telling his friends that they had hired Hitler and would have him squeaking in a corner within two months; it was Papen who squeaked, nearly murdered in the purge of June 1934, and who then served the regime as ambassador in Vienna and Ankara until 1944. He had been a military attache in Washington in 1915, expelled for sabotage, a staff officer with the Turks in Palestine, and a right-wing Centre Party deputy in the Prussian diet whom nobody took seriously until General Schleicher, looking for a chancellor Hindenburg would like, thought of him. His government lifted the ban on the SA, deposed the Social Democratic government of Prussia by emergency decree in July 1932, the act that removed the republic's last defence, and called two elections that made the Nazis the largest party without giving him a majority. Schleicher replaced him in December and could not govern either. Papen met Hitler at the banker Schroder's house in Cologne on 4 January 1933, agreed a cabinet in which the Nazis would have three posts and the conservatives the rest, and sold it to the president, who had refused Hitler twice, as a way to tame him. Within weeks the Reichstag fire decree and the Enabling Act had removed the constraints he had promised. In June 1934 he gave a speech at Marburg, written by his adviser Edgar Jung, criticising the regime's violence, and in the Night of the Long Knives Jung was shot, Papen's office was raided, two of his staff killed, and he was kept under house arrest for three days and then sent to Vienna as minister. He prepared the Anschluss from there and spent the war as ambassador to Turkey. Nuremberg acquitted him in 1946, a German denazification court sentenced him to eight years and released him in 1949, and he wrote memoirs blaming everyone else. He died in 1969.
- Lived: 1879 CE – 1969 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: chancellor, politician, diplomat
