Franz von Papen Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Military Formation
Franz von Papen was born on 29 October 1879 in Werl, Westphalia, into a Catholic aristocratic family of the Prussian Rhineland. Educated in cadet schools and trained for a military career, he entered the Prussian Army as a cavalry officer. The social world he inhabited was that of the Kaiserreich officer corps: conservative, monarchist, and steeped in ideas of duty, hierarchy, and national service. The discipline and network he acquired in uniform would shape his conduct in politics and diplomacy for the rest of his life.

World War I and Diplomatic Service
At the outbreak of World War I he was assigned to diplomatic and intelligence duties. As a military attache in Washington, and for a time in Mexico, he became embroiled in clandestine activities that offended the neutrality of the United States. Declared persona non grata, he was expelled in 1915 and returned to Germany, where he resumed staff work. The episode left a permanent mark on his reputation abroad: he was seen as energetic and resourceful, but also as willing to take risks that stretched legal and diplomatic norms.

Entry into Weimar Politics
After the war and the collapse of the monarchy, Papen entered politics with the Catholic Centre Party (Zentrum). He won a seat in the Prussian Landtag and developed a profile as a conservative Catholic notable who opposed both revolutionary left-wing movements and sweeping social reforms. He cultivated ties with senior military men and with President Paul von Hindenburg, who valued figures prepared to stabilize the republic without embracing parliamentary mass politics. He also became acquainted with Kurt von Schleicher, a general and political operator whose advice carried weight with Hindenburg.

Chancellorship in 1932 and the Presidential System
In late May and June 1932, amid deepening economic crisis and parliamentary deadlock, Hindenburg dismissed the cabinet of Heinrich Bruening and unexpectedly appointed Papen as Chancellor. Papen had no parliamentary base; his cabinet of aristocrats and conservative experts, nicknamed the Cabinet of Barons, relied on presidential emergency decrees. Among his ministers were Constantin von Neurath at the Foreign Office, Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk at Finance, Franz Gurtner at Justice, and Schleicher overseeing Defense. Wilhelm von Gayl became Interior Minister. Papen aimed to reassert conservative order, revise the constitution in a more authoritarian direction, and break the strength of the Social Democrats in Prussia.

One of his earliest and consequential measures was the lifting of the ban on the Nazi SA and SS, which had been imposed during the preceding government. The decision pleased Adolf Hitler and strengthened the Nazi movement in the streets and at the polls, while contributing to rising political violence. Papen dissolved the Reichstag and governed between elections by decree under Article 48, hoping to engineer a more manageable legislature.

The Prussian Coup and the 1932 Elections
On 20 July 1932 Papen carried out the so-called Prussian coup (Preussenschlag). Using emergency powers and citing public disorder, he deposed the lawful Social Democratic-led government of Prussia under Otto Braun and Interior Minister Carl Severing, and installed himself as Reich Commissioner over the largest German state. The move was a watershed in the erosion of federalism and parliamentary norms. It undercut one of the last bastions of republican authority and concentrated power in Berlin.

Elections in July 1932 made the Nazis the largest party in the Reichstag, but without a majority. Papen could not command a majority either, and his experiment in rule by decree bred resentment across the political spectrum. A second election in November did not resolve the stalemate. When Schleicher withdrew support and argued that Papen had lost what little viability he possessed, Hindenburg dismissed Papen in December and appointed Schleicher as Chancellor instead.

Negotiations and the Appointment of Hitler
Schleicher failed to stabilize the situation. Papen, sidelined but still close to Hindenburg and his son Oskar, opened talks with Hitler and conservative leaders including Alfred Hugenberg, calculating that a coalition could be formed in which conservatives would contain the Nazis. Otto Meissner, head of the presidential chancellery, was pivotal in these maneuvers. Papen became the key broker who persuaded Hindenburg that Hitler could be appointed Chancellor at the head of a coalition with only a few Nazi ministers, while Papen would serve as Vice-Chancellor and act as a check on him. On 30 January 1933 Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor. Wilhelm Frick took the Interior Ministry, and Hermann Goering entered the cabinet while quickly accruing power in Prussia.

Papen believed that the traditional elites could guide policy and restrain the radicalism of the Nazi movement. It was a profound miscalculation. Within weeks, the Reichstag Fire and the Enabling Act gave Hitler the legislative and police instruments to dismantle the constitutional state.

Vice-Chancellorship and the Marburg Speech
As Vice-Chancellor in 1933 and 1934, Papen found his influence shrinking rapidly. Joseph Goebbels dominated propaganda; Goering controlled the Prussian police; Heinrich Himmler and the SS expanded their reach; and Franz Gurtner at Justice increasingly accommodated the new order. Papen's staff tried to defend conservative and Catholic interests from within, and he attempted to secure space for the churches and for non-Nazi conservatives to speak and organize.

His boldest move came in June 1934, when he delivered the Marburg speech at the University of Marburg. Drafted largely by his aide and speechwriter Edgar Jung, and supported by Papen's press chief Herbert von Bose, the speech criticized lawlessness, propaganda excess, and the ongoing revolutionary agitation of the SA under Ernst Roehm. It called, in controlled but unmistakable terms, for a return to legality, restraint, and traditional values. The speech infuriated Goebbels and Hitler. When the regime launched the purge later that month, known as the Night of the Long Knives, Jung and Bose were murdered; Schleicher and his wife were also killed. Papen was placed under house arrest, his office raided, his staff dismantled. He survived, but his already small leverage was broken.

Ambassador to Austria
Seeking to remove Papen from Berlin while avoiding a rupture with conservative circles, Hitler sent him as ambassador to Vienna in 1934. In Austria he dealt first with Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, who soon was assassinated during a failed Nazi putsch, and then with Kurt Schuschnigg. Papen presented himself as a conciliator while working to increase German influence. He helped negotiate the July 1936 agreement that eased tensions but, in practice, expanded the standing of Austrian Nazis and constrained Austrian independence. His mission operated in the long shadow of Joachim von Ribbentrop's hard-line diplomacy and Berlin's strategic aims. The Anschluss of March 1938 ended Austria's sovereignty and concluded Papen's assignment there.

Ambassador to Turkey and World War II
In 1939 Papen became ambassador to Turkey, a pivotal neutral state. His task was to keep Turkey from aligning decisively against Germany and, if possible, to tilt Ankara toward Berlin's interests. He engaged in high-stakes diplomacy while the Abwehr and other intelligence services pursued their own agendas. During his tenure there was a failed assassination attempt against him in Ankara in 1942, underscoring the risks surrounding his post. Turkey remained neutral for most of the war and severed relations with Germany only late in the conflict. Papen was recalled in 1944 as Germany's position deteriorated.

Arrest, Nuremberg, and Denazification
Detained by Allied forces in 1945, Papen was indicted before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The prosecution portrayed him as an enabler of aggression who had helped destroy the Weimar Republic and had facilitated Hitler's rise. The tribunal acknowledged his role in the erosion of constitutional government but acquitted him on the specific charges, citing insufficient evidence that he had participated in planning aggressive war. The judgment provoked debate: to some he appeared as a symbol of the conservative elites who believed they could use Hitler; to others his acquittal reflected the legal limits of the indictments.

His legal troubles did not end there. In the subsequent German denazification process he was initially classified as a significant offender, receiving a sentence that was later reduced on appeal. He was released in 1949 after time already served. The proceedings cemented his image as a man who had helped midwife dictatorship while trying to preserve his own conservative and Catholic milieu.

Later Years and Writings
In the early 1950s Papen published memoirs defending his career and motives, notably a volume in which he argued that his tactics had aimed to protect Germany from civil war and to steer the country through crisis, and that he had resisted excesses once the dictatorship emerged. His works inevitably reignited controversies about responsibility and guilt among the non-Nazi elites. He returned to private life in West Germany, occasionally commenting on public affairs but holding no office. He died on 2 May 1969 in Obersasbach.

Assessment and Legacy
Franz von Papen's life traversed the fall of the Kaiserreich, the troubled Weimar years, the destruction of German democracy, and the reckoning after 1945. His brief chancellorship in 1932 and his negotiations that led to Hitler's appointment mark him as a central figure in the demise of parliamentary rule. Around him moved powerful actors whose trajectories intersected with his: President Paul von Hindenburg and his son Oskar; the strategist Kurt von Schleicher; Adolf Hitler and the Nazi leadership including Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, and Ernst Roehm; conservative ministers such as Neurath, Gurtner, and Schwerin von Krosigk; and Austrian leaders Dollfuss and Schuschnigg.

Papen was a talented broker and courtier of power, but his political vision assumed that traditional elites could harness mass movements without being consumed by them. The Marburg speech, costing the lives of Edgar Jung and Herbert von Bose, revealed a belated alarm at a revolution he had helped unleash. His acquittal at Nuremberg and later denazification verdicts left the historical verdict to scholars and the public. In that judgment he has often stood as the exemplar of a conservative class that underestimated radicalism, overestimated its own leverage, and, in trying to tame a force it despised, opened the way for catastrophe.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Franz, under the main topics: Leadership - Freedom - Faith - War.