2024-08-04 02:25:59
“Big mistake.” This is how Franz Von Papen described the secret negotiation he made with Hitler, a few months before the general election of 1933, to give him power in Germany. He did so in the belief that it was best for his country and for his own political position, and by the time he realized his mistake, it was too late. It is fair to ask whether the former leader of the last period of the Weimar Republic had the ability to prevent the outbreak of the Second World War and the Holocaust that ended the lives of millions of people in concentration camps built by the German Empire in the center of Europe.
In 1954, ABC told the inside story of these negotiations, by publishing exclusive passages from Joachim von Ribbentrop’s memoirs that had not been published in Spain. In them, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Third Reich remembered before he died, in Nuremberg, the beginning of his relationship with Hitler, where one of the first people involved was our singer.
He said this: «I saw him for the first time in the middle of August 1932. It was some time after his negotiations with the Berlin Government, which ended in complete failure. There was a plan to give him the Presidency of the Ottoman Empire, but, in fact, he was only offered the position of Vice President, which he refused. Some friends in the League of Nations asked me to meet Hitler and try to serve as a mediator between him and Franz von Papen, whom I knew. I met Adolf in Berchtesgaden. “I am very angry with Von Papen and the whole Berlin government.”
Hitler, for his part, remembered the same time like this: «Ribbentrop came to see me in the summer of 1932 with the idea that I form a coalition government with Von Papen. I made it clear that I did not trust the general and that it was my desire to form a Government with General Kurt von Schleicher. Ribbentrop, on the other hand, was of the opinion that loyal cooperation with von Schleicher was impossible. For two hours I argued and tried to make him understand that Schleicher, as a good Prussian general, would not break his word of honor, but I could not convince him of this and he said that he did not want to work as intermediate between General von Schleicher and I, since you deserve no confidence in your opinion, Von Papen is truly a man of honor.
Unknown key
When Von Papen took over the post of commander, he cooperated with Hitler and put all limits on the military activities of the Nazi Party, then he agreed to dissolve the Diet and hold elections. 1932 came before the federal government, but when the Nazis rose as the leading political power in Germany, nothing went as expected.
Although unknown to most, Von Papen was an important figure in 20th century psychology, although his subsequent development was very unfortunate. As soon as Hitler took office in January 1933, he quickly sided with other right-wing politicians who, apart from the Nazi Party, had helped him in his rise. To justify his tact, Von Papen went so far as to say: “In two months we will have Hitler crying in a corner.” It was evidently wrong, as he was even removed from the post of vice-regent, which he briefly served as ‘Führer’s second’ between January 1933 and August 1934.
Without being completely expelled from the Empire, Von Papen was sent into exile in a low position, ambassador to Austria. He was in position between 1934 and 1938 and favored the intrigues and pressure policy that Hitler maintained on the Republic of Austria before the annexation of the territories to Greater Germany: the well-known ‘Anschluss’. He was then assigned to another diplomatic post, Turkey, where he worked to counter the disloyalty of the Turkish Government against the tactics of the allies.
Spain
But in 1944, Germany went into the abyss, and when the war was lost, Von Papen sold his card. As the publication of the magazine ‘Blanco y Negro’ said much later, it was these decisions that brought him to Spain for the first time: «He was in Turkey until the end of 1944, when Ankara broke its relations with Berlin. With Germany defeated, Von Papen tried to be a peace negotiator and, in February 1945, he traveled to Madrid and Lisbon on several private trips. But two months later, American soldiers imprisoned him in his Westphalian properties. Tried at Nuremberg, he was first acquitted, then sentenced to eight years of hard labor. After his lawyers wrote a plea, he was released, but he had to pay a fine for his activities under the Nazi regime.
In the same article, it was reported that, since 1957, Von Papen had tried to get a pension for his years of service as a soldier, but the Karlsruhe Court rejected his request. The argument is based on the fact that former members of the German army, and “those who violated human rights during the Third Reich,” cannot benefit from the same right that the authorities have to resign. “Von Papen, at 89 years old, is a retired man with no state pension,” this newspaper added.
When Franz von Papen was old, he visited Spain for the second time, in 1954, at a time when some Nazi leaders at that time also found refuge in our country. He, without pending charges with the justice system, has nothing to do. There is no evidence to show that he even met some of the leaders of the Third Kingdom before. It’s a courtesy trip. In fact, he was traveling with his daughter Isabella.
Torremolinos
It is the first in Granada. On March 10, 1954, he arrived at the Hotel La Roca in Torremolinos, the property of the family of Luis Antonio Bolín, a famous lawyer and lawyer in the Cortes during the first four terms of office of the Franco government. In newspaper photographs of the time, a distinguished old man appears, apparently happy and relaxed, on the terrace of a large hotel overlooking the coast of Malaga, according to Rafael de la Fuente in ‘The idea of Malaga’.
He also passed through Valencia and visited the editorial office of ‘Areas’. I warmly greet all the journalists, as I continue to make the power that I have in Germany. There he spent a long time with the director, Martín Domínguez, in his office.
His vanity and pride, his inability to admit mistakes and to see and feel the line that separates civilization from crime, weighed on him for the rest of his life. Although he escaped, he knew that he was responsible for what happened. Until the end of his days he had to live with the memory of Hitler’s crimes and his responsibility to bring him to power.
The destruction of Nazism
The worst balance of the Nazi’s destructive power was made public in 2011 by the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, through the project ‘Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos’. The result is a map of 42,500 concentration camps, ghettos and forced labor centers that caused between 15 and 20 million deaths or internments. More than most of them, but members of other groups persecuted by Nazism, such as gypsies and homosexuals. “The figures are higher than originally thought,” said Hartmut Berghoff, director of the German Historical Institute in Washington.
However, the count for most studies conducted since 1945 is six million. In the same year, the Institute of Jewish Affairs in New York previously placed the death toll between 5,659,600 and 5,673,100. A picture similar to the one previously revealed by William Höttl, a former member of the SS, who claimed that Adolf Eichmann, who was the artist of the last solution, used it in 1944.
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