SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: If that is your view, why did you write these letters expressing this fulsome admiration of Hitler?
VON PAPEN: What I wished to express in the interrogatory, or rather what I wanted Herr Von Lersner to be asked was the following: Is it correct...
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: The answers the witness expects are in his question. It is one of the best examples of a leading question I have ever seen. You say that your interrogatory expresses your view, do you not?
VON PAPEN: I might say that if I were of this opinion that with the 30th of June it became apparent that further co-operation with Hitler was no longer possible and that, therefore, the coalition program which had been agreed upon between us had collapsed...
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: You say again that you have an unchanged loyalty and admiration and that you have co-operated?
“I remain loyally devoted to you for your work, for our Germany.”
If your view is put in that interrogatory, that the foundations of your faith had been shaken, why do you write that you remain loyally devoted to Hitler’s work for Germany?
VON PAPEN: I have already told you and the Tribunal that I hoped that, in spite of the collapse of the domestic situation, Hitler would at least in the field of foreign policy pursue a reasonable course. He was there; we could not remove him. We had to reckon with Hitler and his Government. All the gentlemen continued to co-operate; I was the only one who stepped out. All these letters with which you are trying to prove I am insincere or that I am not truthful, or, as you call it, that I am a liar or a deceiver, cannot deny to the world the fact that I resigned at that time.
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: And you took another job within 11 days. Eleven days after the last letter you had taken the job of representing this—well, I will not say a gang of murderers—this Government which had adopted murder as an instrument of policy, as Plenipotentiary to Austria, within 11 days of your last letter.
Let us just see whether the murder motif did not come into that. Did you think that Hitler had been behind the July Putsch in Austria, which had resulted in the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss?