Friedrich Franz von Papen

Street named after Friedrich Franz von Papen in Wallerfangen in Saarland

Friedrich Franz von Papen (also often referred to as Franz von Papen Jr.) (born July 15, 1911 in Potsdam , † January 4, 1983 ) was a German lawyer and businessman .

Live and act

Friedrich Franz von Papen was born in 1911 as the third of five children and the only son of the officer and later Chancellor Franz von Papen and his wife, Martha Boch-Galhau . Papen spent his childhood on his parents' estate near Werl .

After graduating from high school, von Papen began studying law. From 1931 to 1932 he spent a year of his studies at the Catholic Georgetown University in the United States. During his stay in the USA, von Papen met the diplomat Wolfgang Gans Edler Herr zu Putlitz , who was in charge of cultural affairs at the German embassy in Washington, and Henry Adams, a fellow student at Georgetown University, who later wrote a biography about von Papen's father , know.

Soon after his father was appointed Reich Chancellor in June 1932, von Papen returned to Germany. In the years 1932 to 1934 he experienced the decisive political events - the chancellorship of his father, the chancellorship of Kurt von Schleicher , the appointment of Hitler, the vice-chancellorship of his father and his fall in the course of the events of June / July 1934 - at close range. Hans-Otto Meissner describes Papen as “good-looking” and “in his behavior [giving] no cause for complaint”. Another acquaintance of these years, who called him a notable personality in her memoir, was the American diplomat's daughter Martha Dodd .

At the beginning of July 1934, Papen passed the First State Examination in Berlin (Referendarexamen) with the rating "sufficient".

At the end of the 1930s, Papen went to Argentina as a representative of an industrial company, from where he returned to Germany via East Asia after the outbreak of World War II.

Papen later took part in World War II , in which he achieved the rank of captain. After he was wounded once on the Eastern Front in 1941, Papen was wounded again in the last phase of the war in 1944/1945 as a member of an SS tank reconnaissance department in Rennes and taken to a Paris hospital. He then spent several weeks in a Berlin hospital before being released in mid-March 1945. To cure his broken hip, he went to the estate of his brother-in-law Max von Stockhausen near Hirschberg in Westphalia. There, shortly before the end of the war, on April 9 or 10, 1945, von Papen was arrested by Sergeant Steve Witchiko, a member of the 1st Company of the 194th Glider Infantry Regiment of the American Army.

From 1945 to 1946, von Papen took part in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals as assistant (auxiliary defender ) to Egon Kubuschok , his father's main defender . For this purpose he was provisionally released from American internment in autumn 1945 . Papen Senior later judged in his memoirs about his son's role in the trial: “But he [Kubuschok] also learned in his practice in Nuremberg that political trials require different qualities than an experienced criminal defense lawyer in Germany was used to bringing with them. Since I didn't know him personally, I wished to put my son at his side. He had seen long periods of my political life and was able to complement the lack of knowledge my lawyer had. After a long effort, he was released from his Stenay POW camp for the duration of the trial. Without wanting to diminish Kubuschok's services to my defense in the slightest, I can say that without my son's cooperation the end result would probably have been different. "

After the end of the trial, Papen Jr. was finally released from prison. He then took over the defense of his father in the Nuremberg Arbitration Chamber proceedings from 1947, and then worked as a close associate of Hans Flächsner in other war crimes trials until 1949 , for example in the defense of Otto Steinbrinck during the Flick trial. After the war Papen corresponded with numerous personalities of contemporary history such as Heinrich Brüning , Gottfried Treviranus and Miklós Horthy and historians such as Jürgen Arne Bach.

From 1955 at the latest, until at least 1963, von Papen is mentioned as managing director of the Hugo Stinnes trading company in Mülheim . In this capacity, von Papen was responsible for the administration of an annual turnover of 600 to 700 million DM. Von Papen also caused a certain public sensation when he informed the Federal Ministry of Finance in 1955 about the existence of a Swiss secret account that his father had on behalf of the Reich government during the Second World War had founded, announced and whose foreign currency had become accessible again after the conclusion of the German-Swiss clearing agreement of 1952, and whose handover to the Finance Ministry von Papen finally organized in cooperation with the Ministry.

Fonts

• On the 100th birthday of my father Franz von Papen. 1979.

literature

• Franz von Papen, One Alley for Truth , Munich 1952.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans von Luck: Panzer Commander. The Memoirs of Colonel Hans Von Luck , 1989, p. 13.
2. ↑ Saarbrücker Zeitung January 6, 1983 .... At the age of 71 the lawyer died on Tuesday morning .... Franz von Papen
3. ↑ Franz Müller: A “right-wing Catholic” between the cross and the swastika , citing a private article by Papens from October 1979. The book Blunder! How the US Gave Away Nazi Supersecrets to Russia by Tom Agoston from 1985 mentions on p. Xv that Papen Jr. had already died at the time of this book's publication.
4. ↑ Wolfgang Gans Pulitz: Unterwegs nach Deutschland , 1971, p. 91. Pulitz calls von Papen his protégé for this time.
5. ↑ Hans-OttoMeissner: Young Years in the Reich President 's Palace , 1988, p. 326.
6. ↑ Martha Dodd: Through Embassy Eyes , 1939, p. 154 and passim.
7. ↑ Wolfgang Schuller (Ed.): Carl Schmitt: Diaries 1930 to 1934 , Berlin 2010, p. 349.
8. ↑ Fuermann, George, 1918-, Cranz, F. Edward (Ferdinand Edward): Ninety-fifth Infantry Division history, 1918-1946 . Ed .: Atlanta, A. Love Enterprises. 1947, p. 384 (English, archive.org ).
9. ^ Papen: Alley . . 597 and Helmuth Euler : The decisive battle on the Rhine and Ruhr 1945 , 1980, p. 189.
10. ↑ United States Army XVI. Corps: History of the XVI Corps from Its Activation to the End of the War in Europe , 1947, p. 70. Also Derek S. Zumbro: Battle for the Ruhr. The German Army's Final Defeat in the West , 2006, p. 365.
11. ^ Barth Hagerman: War Stories , p. 273.
12. ↑ Papen: One Alley for Truth. P. 628.
13. ^ "Von Papen's Son Released", in: New York Times of October 10, 1946.
14. ^ Günter Ogger: Friedrich Flick der Grosse , 1973, p. 212.
15. ↑ Der Spiegel 16/1955, p. 10., Deutsche Rundschau , 1963, p. 6.
16. ↑ Der Spiegel 16/1955, p. 10.