Fellow Traveler

MEMOIRS (634 pp.)--Franz von Papen --Dutton ($6.50).

A dapper, white-haired aristocrat whose socks always matched his ties, he looked like a slick silver fox. Americans knew him for years from the headlines as a practitioner of duplicity, not diplomacy. One of the nimblest side-changers since Talleyrand, Franz von Papen managed to serve the Kaiser, the Weimar Republic and the Nazis, and to save his neck through two world wars, countless purges, and the Nuernberg war-crimes trials. His Memoirs are a long apologia to prove that he lived "in the service of God and my country." That gives the old (73) intriguer a lot of explaining to do. In his effort to show that he was a knight and not a knave, he gives the impression of having been as much a fool as a fox.

The Spy. A proud twig on a 500-year-old family tree, Von Papen sprouted right into the German general staff, and in 1913, at 34, went to Washington as a military attache with blessings from the Kaiser himself. When war broke out, the charming young captain became a spy and displayed a monumental ineptitude for that exacting profession until he was declared persona non grata in the U.S. He hired saboteurs* he did not know and repeatedly cabled in the clear the name of at least one fellow spy (who was caught). Sent to the Middle East, where the Allies were fighting the Turks, Lieut. Colonel von Papen took such amateurish security measures that scores of incriminating documents fell into British hands. As a result, London supposedly issued instructions: "If Von Papen is captured, release him; he is of more value to us free."

When World War I ended, Von Papen slipped out of the army and into politics. He was a member of the Catholic Center Party and sat in the Prussian State Parliament for eleven relatively obscure years. Then General Kurt von Schleicher, the power behind President von Hindenburg, picked Von Papen to be Chancellor of Germany. The government's task, as Chancellor von Papen saw it in 1932, was "to tame the Nazis by involving them in the responsibilities of government." Like liberals who became fellow travelers of the Communists to fight fascism, Von Papen became a fellow traveler of the fascists to fight Communism. Instead of "taming" the Nazis, the Von Papen government legalized the Storm Troopers.

The Politician. Nonetheless, the Nazis promptly forced Von Papen out of power, but 2 1/2 months later he was back, a Vice Chancellor under a new boss--Adolf Hitler. Von Papen helped to give the new regime of bloody, beer-hall brawlers an air of diplomatic respectability, and Hitler appreciated the service. Years later, the Fuehrer told his benefactor: "Herr von Papen, you proved yourself to be a great German."

Why did Von Papen go along with Hitler if, as he claims, he did not really agree with him? Suggesting the highly unlikely role of a tail-coated, top-hatted Trilby to Hitler's ranting Svengali, Von Papen pleads that he was a "victim" of the Fuehrer's magnetic personality. When Svengali-Hitler cooed, "We must never part until our work is accomplished," Trilby-Papen was "happy to agree."

The Ambassador. In 1934, bravely suppressing a twinge of suspicion, Von Papen agreed to be Hitler's Minister to Vienna. There he tried to conquer Austria for the Nazis "peacefully," by organized sabotage and propaganda. After four years, Hitler stopped Von Papen's slow choke with the velvet glove and swung his iron fist. Although he says Hitler had promised him not to use force in Austria, Von Papen shared the "general intoxication" of the Anschluss and was awarded the Gold Medal of the Nazi Party for his efforts.

In 1939, "against my will," he became Ambassador to Ankara, hoping "to do what I could to avert" a general war. Four months later, Hitler pressed the plunger for World War II. He "grossly misled me again," complains Von Papen. But he stayed at his post anyway "to limit the conflict," i.e., to keep the Turks from fighting on the side of the Allies. Eventually, Turkey broke diplomatic relations with Germany, and Von Papen returned to the Reich after the German officers' plot on Hitler's life had failed. He claims that he "fully expected to be arrested by the Gestapo," but Von Papen had done nothing to deserve such a fate, and was scarcely the man to walk open-eyed to his doom. When he got home, Hitler handed him another medal: the Knight's Cross of the Military Order of Merit.

At war's end, Von Papen was arrested and tried at Nuernberg on charges of having conspired to wage war. He was acquitted, but the British prosecutor, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, told him: "You had seen your own friends, your own servants, murdered around you . . . The only reason which could have . . . made you take one job after another from the Nazis was that you sympathized with their work."

Franz von Papen's autobiography does little to change that appraisal.

*Von Papen has been widely suspected of organizing the 1916 munitions explosion at the Black Tom pier in Jersey City, N.J. and the 1917 explosion that wrecked the Canadian Car & Foundry plant at Kingsland, N.J. In 1939, a Mixed Claims Commission found Germany guilty of both blasts, but Von Papen still denies responsibility.

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