The Holocaust Historiography Project

Partial translation of document 3317-PS

	 VON PAPEN’s ADDRESS, AS CHANCELLOR,
   Delivered in Munich on 12 October 1932,
			Frankfurter Zeitung,
		  13 October 1932, Page 2.

It is a historical falsification when it is
claimed today that I, the Chancellor, had
prevented National Socialism form taking over the
responsibility.  The offer of 13 August gave the
NSDAP a share in the power in the Reich and in
Prussia which would have assured it decisive
influence.  Hitler did not accept this offer
because he believed that he as leader of a
movement represented by 230 parliamentary mandates
should claim the position of the chancellor.  He
made this claim on the principle of
totalitarianism, of exclusiveness which his party
adheres to.
                    *******

The essence of conservative ideology is its being
anchored in the divine order of things. That too
is its fundamental difference compared with the
doctrine advocated by the NSDAP.  The principle of
"exclusiveness” of a political “everything or
nothing” which the latter adheres to, its mythical
Messiah-belief in the bombastic Fuehrer who alone
is destined to direct fate, gives it the character
of a political sect.  And therein I see the
unbridgeable cleavage between a conservative
policy born of faith and a nationalsocialist creed
as a matter of politics.  It seems to me that
today names and individuals are unimportant when
Germany’s final fate is at stake.  What the nation
demands is this:  it expects of a movement which
has written upon its banner the internal and
external national freedom that it will act, at all
times and under all circumstances, as if it were
the spiritual, social and political conscience of
the nation. If it does not act that way;  if this
movement follows merely tactical points of view,
democratic parliamentarian points of view, if it
engages in the soliciting of mass support using
demagogic agitation and means of proletarian class
struggle-then it is not a movement any more, it
has become a political party.

                   *******

And, indeed, the Reich was almost destroyed by the
political parties.  One simply cannot, on one
side, despise mercilessly masses and majorities,
as Herr Hitler is doing, and on the other hand
surrender to parliamentarian democracy: surrender
to the extent of  adopting resolutions against
one’s own government together with the
Bolshevists.

                   *******

In the interests of the entire nation we decline
the claim to power by parties which want to own
their followers body and soul, and which want to
put themselves, as a party or a movement, over and
above the whole nation.