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This article was published in the Völkischer Beobachter, the party newspaper of the NSDAP, on November 6, 1932, the day on which Reichstag elections were held in Germany for the second time that year. The last elections had only been held in July of the same year, but in September Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen found himself in open conflict with the two strongest parties in parliament, the KPD and the NSDAP. Like his predecessor, Heinrich Brüning, Papen, who also belonged to the Catholic Center Party, was unable to win a parliamentary majority for his policies and instead governed with Hindenburg’s support through emergency decrees. In September 1932, the KPD tabled a motion of no confidence, which the NSDAP supported. Papen then asked Reich President Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag once again and call new elections in the hope of weakening the NSDAP. Although the NSDAP lost seats after the November elections, it remained the strongest party in parliament. The unnamed author of this article quotes an essay from the Italian daily newspaper La Stampa, in which Papen’s strategy had supposedly been called out and criticized. La Stampa had been controlled by Mussolini’s fascist regime since 1925. The article’s blunt headline suggests that it was primarily the Jews in Germany who would continue to support Papen’s government out of fear of the National Socialists.

“The Jews Vote for Papen!” (November 6, 1932)

Source

Sunday/Monday, November 6/7, 1932

The Jews Vote for Papen!

A revealing essay in the Roman “Stampa”

(Wire report from our Roman representative.)

Rome, November 4.

Piacca launches a sharp attack against the Papen cabinet in today’s “Stampa,”

stating that, with its state policy, it had put a kind of fox nose on Hindenburg’s clever face. The danger, he says, is to replace cleverness with mere cunning.

It was hoped that the National Socialist movement would be so weakened that a majority with the Center would no longer be possible as before, and that the National Socialists would be prepared to come to an agreement with the Center and the German Nationals under the glory of the government. Papen’s maneuver consisted in taking away the Center’s key position in the distribution of parliamentary power and handing it over to the small German National group for the government’s disposal.

The government is constantly jabbing the National Socialist Party with needles in order to prove to all good and fearful citizens that the goals of the National Socialists can be achieved without their help by the present government.

The government indulges in the hope that National Socialism will lose a lot of votes.

The votes that the party could lose, says Piacca, would be those that are in any case uncertain elements in all elections, which can only be an advantage for a party to lose. The government will win over those votes that have the great hope that absolute economic freedom, to which the state will be subject, will prevail in the sense of an über-industrialism. After all, v. Papen wants nothing else. But if we are not mistaken, says Piacca, von Papen’s holy empire has already perished once.

The great mass of Jews in Germany, who are very fearful and extremely mobile at the moment, will stand by him completely. Any obstacle against the National Socialists is fine with them in order to alleviate their fear.

Papen believes he can reintegrate the German people into the state. But for him there is only one way: to place the masses and the state under the yoke of the economy, which he wants to reintroduce in its absolute freedom. This and nothing else is the doctrine of the von Papen cabinet.

With much irony, Piacca criticizes the idea of a syndicalist cabinet under von Papen as the last resort of the cabinet, and its isolation. “He stands there like a Siegfried and wants to destroy not only the social dragon of the National Socialists’ social program, but also every other kind of socialism, in order to allow the parades of the masses of Hitler’s Third Reich to march in through his syndicalist triumphal arches.”

Source of original German text: „Die Juden wählen Papen!,“ Völkischer Beobachter, November 6, 1932.

Translation: GHI staff