Franz von Papen

Biography

Franz von Papen was born in 1879 in Werl, Westphalia, into a wealthy Catholic noble family. Trained at cadet schools and the main cadet institute at Lichterfelde, he served in the Prussian Army from 1898 and joined the General Staff in 1913. As military attaché in Mexico and the United States he secretly organised sabotage and backed forces in the Mexican Revolution for German intelligence until he was expelled in 1915; he then commanded a battalion on the Western Front and ended the war as a lieutenant colonel in the Middle East.

A Centre Party member of the Prussian Landtag in the 1920s, he was appointed chancellor by President Hindenburg in June 1932. He ruled by decree, represented Germany at the Lausanne Conference on reparations, deposed the Social Democratic government of Prussia in the July 1932 coup, and dissolved the Reichstag twice before losing office to Kurt von Schleicher. Seeking to return, he persuaded Hindenburg in January 1933 to appoint Hitler chancellor, with himself as vice-chancellor, believing Hitler could be contained.

As vice-chancellor he negotiated the 1933 Reichskonkordat with the Vatican, and in June 1934 his Marburg speech criticised Nazi excesses. During the Night of the Long Knives he was placed under house arrest and close associates were murdered, and he left the government. He then served Hitler as ambassador to Austria, helping prepare the Anschluss, and to Turkey from 1939 to 1944, joining the Nazi Party in 1938. Acquitted at Nuremberg, he was sentenced by a denazification court to eight years' hard labour but released on appeal in 1949, and he died in 1969.