Felix von Papen

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Felix Maria Michael von Papen-Wilbring (born May 12, 1910 in Diedenhofen , † April 7, 1945 in Jena ) was a German resister.

Life and activity

Family table Franz von Papen (Köningen) for Felix Anton von Papen (Wilbring 1)

Papen came from the noble von Papen family and was the son of Felix Anton von Papen (1871–1956). The Chancellor Franz von Papen was the cousin of Felix Anton and thus Uncle I of Felix due to the cross-marriage of her grandparents. On his mother's side (Maria Scholten) he was of Dutch descent.

Little is known about his career up to 1933. At the beginning of the 1930s he lived as a business journalist and banker in Berlin , where he frequented Prussian-monarchist and upper-class circles.

In December 1933, not quite a year after the National Socialists came to power , Papen was arrested for monarchist activities. He first spent a few weeks in the Columbiahaus concentration camp in Berlin before he was sent to the Oranienburg concentration camp as a prisoner on January 11, 1934 . From there he was transferred to the Lichtenburg concentration camp . In both camps, but especially in Oranienburg, Papen was exposed to severe abuse: As soon as he arrived at the camp, he was brutally beaten in the filing room by SA members under the supervision of Obersturmführer Hans Stahlkopf , in which his tailbone was broken. During the first time he was imprisoned in Oranienburg, Papen had to pick up matches, cigarette butts and scraps of paper. Because of his aristocratic origins, Papen continued to face frequent harassment and abuse. He was kept in solitary confinement for weeks and was not allowed to leave his cell even to escape, so he was forced to use a cardboard box for his evacuation. He eventually attempted suicide . During the last weeks of his imprisonment in Oranienburg he worked as a clerk.

After his release, Papen summarized the impressions of his imprisonment as follows:

“I can hardly describe the terrible inner struggle I had to go through in such degrading scenes. How am I supposed to say it? I am ashamed to live and have all of this with me. I am ashamed of everyone else who also had to endure these wretchednesses. I will probably never get over it in my life. I should have defended myself, although I was absolutely certain that if I resisted the slightest resistance, I would be shot like a dog over the heap. You were just waiting for it. Why didn't i do it? Is there any excuse for that at all? Yes and no! Most of the time I was so exhausted that I couldn't even think of standing up. I was on the verge of madness. "

On July 14, 1934, von Papen was transferred to Lichtenburg concentration camp for two weeks and then released. After his release, he had to report to the police in Berlin twice a week. After a while he was arrested again for allegedly speaking about the Oranienburg concentration camp in public. He was released after his second attempt at suicide. Von Papen was no longer safe even on his property in Berlin-Kladow; He was constantly watched, and released prisoners who reminded him of the terrible time in the Oranienburg concentration camp visited him again and again. He wanted to escape from all of this and moved to Munich on February 2, 1936 .

After his release from the camp, Papen repeatedly tried to get an audience with Hitler in order to confront him with the conditions in the concentration camps. When this did not succeed, he asked him in a letter dated August 19, 1937, "either to declare himself identical to the sadistic excesses and the deprivation of liberty, or to give him his rights again through compensation and apology."

Papen left Germany in January 1938. He settled in the Netherlands with his family. In the same year he published the book Ein von Papen speaks ... , in which he described his experiences in the National Socialist concentration camps and denounced the camp system. Due to the relationship between the author and the former Chancellor and Vice Chancellor Hitler, the work received a lot of attention. In addition to being an independent volume, Papen's report was also published in serialized form in the newspaper Die Zukunft , edited by Willi Münzenberg .

Due to his book, the Nazi authorities classified Papen as an enemy of the state and expatriated to Germany in 1938. His expatriation, to which his uncle Franz von Papen helped him, was announced in the Reichsanzeiger .

After the German occupation of the Netherlands, Papen was denounced, arrested in 1941 and taken to Buchenwald concentration camp as a political prisoner in 1942. In August 1943 he was admitted to the Jena mental hospital for the treatment of depression - he remained a prisoner. The attending physician, the psychiatrist Berthold Kihn, was deeply involved in euthanasia crimes. A few days before the American troops marched in, Felix von Papen died in the mental hospital. The date of death and the euthanasia practice under Kihn suggest that he was murdered. He left a wife and three children. On September 28, 2014, a memorial stone was erected for the Nazi opponent Felix von Papen at the Werl cemetery in Westphalia.

Archival tradition

A file on Papen is kept in the Swiss Federal Archives (E4320B # 1991/243 # 758 *).

Fonts

  • A von Papen speaks… about his experiences in Hitler Germany , Nijmegen 1938. (New edition 1939, 1945) OCLC 20918639
  • Ein von Papen speaks ... (electronic resource): about his experiences in Hitler's Germany / (Felix von Papen) digitized
  • Felix von Papen. Een von Papen vertelt. Prometheus, Amsterdam 2017, ISBN 978-90-446-3416-7 .

literature

  • Reiner Möckelmann: Franz von Papen. Hitler's eternal vassal , Darmstadt 2016, ISBN 978-3-8053-5026-6 , pp. 282–289
  • Hans-Joachim Fieber, Oliver Reschke: Resistance in Berlin against the Nazi regime 1933 to 1945: A biographical lexicon , volume 12 (second supplementary volume, letters K to Z), Trafo-Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89626-368- 4 , p. 146.
  • Erwin Nippert: Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 , military publishing house of the GDR, Berlin 1988. ISBN 978-3-327-00642-9 .
  • Johannes Tuchel : Concentration Camp. Organizational history and function of the “Inspection of the Concentration Camps” 1934–1938. (= Writings of the Federal Archives, Volume 39). Oldenbourg, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-7646-1902-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Felix von Papen - Een Von Papen speaks: over zijn ervaringen in Hitler-Duitsland. A unique oorlogsdocument . Prometheus, 2017, ISBN 978-90-446-3417-4 ( limited preview in the Google book search - translated from German (Ein Von Papen speaks…) by Janneke Panders ).
  2. ↑ Family table Franz von Papen (Köningen) for Felix Anton von Papen (Wilbring 1)
  3. ↑ Michael Hepp / Hans Georg Lehmann: The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger , 1985, p. 192.
  4. ^ Book of the Dead - Buchenwald Concentration Camp: Felix von Papen In: Buchenwald.de , accessed on January 30, 2019.
  5. ^ Reiner Möckelmann: Franz von Papen. Hitler's eternal vassal , p. 289
personal data
SURNAME Papen, Felix von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Papen, Felix Joseph von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German monarchist
DATE OF BIRTH May 12, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Diedenhofen
DATE OF DEATH April 7, 1945
Place of death Jena