ABSTRACT
Papen, Franz von (1879–1969) Reich Chancellor in 1932 and Hitler's Deputy Chancellor during the first two years of National Socialist rule, Franz von Papen was born in Werl, Westphalia, on 29 October 1879, the son of an old Catholic noble family. He began his career as a Lieutenant in a feudal cavalry regiment and in 1913 became a Captain on the General Staff. During World War I he served in Mexico and Washington as military attaché at the German embassy, being expelled from the United States in 1916 for sabotage activities. Briefly a battalion Commander in France, he was made head of the Operations Section of the army in Turkey and sent in 1918 to Palestine as Chief of the General Staff of the Fourth Turkish Army. Entering politics a few years after the war, von Papen became a member of the Catholic Centre Party group in the Prussian legislature from 1920 to 1932. Identified with the anti-republican right wing who sought the restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy, von Papen became Chairman of the management committee of the Catholic Centre Party newspaper, Germania, and his marriage to the daughter of a leading Saar industrialist secured him good connections with big business circles. A member of the aristocratic Herrenklub (Gentleman's Club), von Papen's Catholic conservatism, his pseudo-Christian nationalism and links with the Reichwehr made him an ideal front-man for the upper classes in Weimar Germany who dreamed of the restoration of an authoritarian State where their privileges would be secure. Though hitherto a political nonentity who lacked any experience of administration, von Papen became Chancellor of Germany on 1 June 1932 in succession to Heinrich Brüning (q.v.), thanks largely to the support of General von Schleicher (q.v.). His conservative cabinet of ‘the barons’ enjoyed the support of President von Hindenburg (q.v.), the Reichswehr and big business, but had no solid majority in the Reichstag.
