SATAN IN TOP HAT—Tibor Koeves—Alliance ($3).
In 1915 German Military Attaché Franz von Papen was expelled from the U.S. for plotting an invasion of Canada, suborning disloyal Germans and Irishmen, blowing up ships, docks, munitions factories, and workingmen with an inept abandon that even a foreign government's official spy is not permitted to indulge. Ever since then, Americans have followed Papen's activities with a somewhat surreptitious personal interest—like that taken in a classmate who was expelled from school.
It has not always been easy to follow Papen. The sartorially perfect diplomat, who (in everything but integrity) much resembles a Prussian Anthony Eden, has been seen largely in tantalizing glimpses, shooting precipitately through the trap doors of Europe's high-political underworld. Last week Hungarian Newshawk Tibor Koeves brought these glimpses together to produce the first full-length biography of Papen in English. His book helped explain the connection between the shadowy circles in which Papen moves and the shadowy circles under his eyes. It also explained in part the chemistry of that strange political amalgam: Junker aristocrats with Nazi riffraff.
The Papens are Erbsälzer, Hereditary Salters of Werl & Neuwerk, an honor which in medieval days assured them a fine hereditary income. This they augmented in cruder capitalist times by discreet ties with those Rhenish Schlotbaronen (smokestack barons) who were later to line the pockets of Adolf Hitler. An expert horseman and gentleman jockey, Franz was early admitted into Germany's select Military Riding School. Six years after leaving school he was a captain on the General Staff. Photographs of Papen taken at that time show the young Erbsälzer looking straight into the camera with a characteristic "calm and open stare." "So," says Author Koeves, "Narcissus might have looked into the clear surface of a limpid stream."
The Dynamiter. As a military attache in Mexico, the young Junker became an eager student of the Mexican revolution. He kept the German War Ministry informed on just how the revolutionists blew up railway trains—"by burying dynamite beneath the line itself. . . . Infernal machines, so far as I know, have not been employed." But they were employed in the U.S., almost as soon as Papen opened his large office at No. 60 Wall Street in 1914.
He also opened a mirror-house at No. 123 W. 15th Street, Manhattan, whose buxom proprietress used to tell wondering neighbors that she rented the place because "its number could be easily remembered by her gentlemen friends."