In the Garden of Beasts

conservative who had become so deeply opposed to the Nazi Party that he briefly considered assassinating Hitler. Until now he had kept his anti-Nazi views out of Papen’s speeches, but he sensed that the growing conflict within the government offered a unique opportunity. If Papen himself spoke outagainst the regime, Jung reasoned, his remarks might at last prompt President Hindenburg and the army to eject the Nazis from power and quash the Storm Troopers, in the interest of restoring order to the nation. Jung had gone over the speech carefully with Tschirschky, but both men had deliberately kept it from Papen until the last moment so that he would have no choice but to deliver it. “The speech took months of preparation,” Tschirschky later said. “It was necessary to find the proper occasion for its delivery, and then everything had to be prepared with the greatest possible care.”
    Now, in the train, as Papen read the text for the first time, Tschirschky saw a look of fear cross his face. It is a measure of the altered mood in Germany—the widespread perception that dramatic change might be imminent—that Papen, an unheroic personality, felt he could go ahead and deliver it and still survive. Not that he had much choice. “We more or less forced him to make that speech,” Tschirschky said. Copies already had been distributed to foreign correspondents. Even if Papen balked at the last minute, the speech would continue to circulate. Clearly hints of its content already had leaked out, for when Papen arrived at the hall the place hummed with anticipation. His anxiety surely spiked when he saw that a number of seats were occupied by men wearing brown shirts and swastika armbands.
    Papen walked to the podium.
    “I am told,” he began, “that my share in events in Prussia, and in the formation of the present Government”—an allusion to his role in engineering Hitler’s appointment as chancellor—“has had such an important effect on developments in Germany that I am under an obligation to view them more critically than most people.”
    The remarks that followed would have earned any man of lesser stature a trip to the gallows. “The Government,” Papen said, “is well aware of the selfishness, the lack of principle, the insincerity, the unchivalrous behavior, the arrogance which is on the increase under the guise of the German revolution.” If the government hoped to establish “an intimate and friendly relationship with the people,” he warned, “then their intelligence must not be underestimated, their trust must be reciprocated and there must be no continual attempt to browbeat them.”
    The German people, he said, would follow Hitler with absolute loyalty “provided they are allowed to have a share in the making and carrying out of decisions, provided every word of criticism is not immediately interpreted as malicious, and provided that despairing patriots are not branded as traitors.”
    The time had come, he proclaimed, “to silence doctrinaire fanatics.”
    The audience reacted as if its members had been waiting a very long time to hear such remarks. As Papen concluded his speech, the crowd leapt to its feet. “The thunder of applause,” Papen noted, drowned out “the furious protests” of the uniformed Nazis in the crowd. Historian John Wheeler-Bennett, at the time a Berlin resident, wrote, “It is difficult to describe the joy with which it was received in Germany. It was as if a load had suddenly been lifted from the German soul. The sense of relief could almost be felt in the air. Papen had put into words what thousands upon thousands of his countrymen had locked up in their hearts for fear of the awful penalties of speech.”
    THAT SAME DAY , Hitler was scheduled to speak elsewhere in Germany on the subject of a visit he had just made to Italy to meet with Mussolini. Hitler turned the opportunity into an attack on Papen and his conservative allies, without mentioning Papen directly. “All these little dwarfs who think they have something to say against our idea will be swept away by its collective strength,” Hitler shouted. He railed against “this ridiculous little worm,” this “pygmy who imagines he can stop, with a few phrases, the gigantic renewal of a people’s life.”
    He issued a warning to the Papen camp: “If they should at any time attempt, even in a small way, to move from their criticism to a new act of perjury, they can be sure that what confronts them