Franz Von Papen: The Man Behind Hitler’s Success?

 by Bruno Di Tillo

Franz Von Papen (right) and Adolf Hitler (left) in 1935

By 1933 Nazi support in the Reichstag was becoming skimmer, and the electorate of the Party as a whole was moving towards other coalitions. In November 1932 Nazis had 33.1% of the Reichstag seats and had lost 34 seats from the 230 of the July elections^[1]. Hindenburg had won the second and final April election of 1932; he’d surpassed Hitler by a mere 16.2% percent^[2], but in the meantime he’d lost the Centre and most of the Conservative right; his political supporters had been shifted with the last election from the old militarist guard of the far-right to the Social Democrats’ coalition that now supported him in fear of Adolf Hitler’s rise, thus seeing Hindenburg as the lesser evil^[3]. Bruening’s presidential government experiment had drawn most of the conservative elites