The Story of the Subversive Speechwriter

Review of: Edgar Julius Jung, Right-Wing Enemy of the Nazis by Roshan Magub (published 2017, 297 pages, Boydell and Brewer)

This year marks the 91^st anniversary of the execution by a Nazi hit squad of Edgar Julius Jung – a deeply conservative, nationalistic German political activist, critic of the Nazis and failed parliamentary candidate who, at the time of his death on July 1, 1934, had been working as a speechwriter to potential German prime minister Franz von Papen. 

EDGAR JULIUS JUNG

Born in 1894, Jung is remembered mainly today for how his violent demise followed just days after Papen delivered an anti-Nazi speech to a large gathering in the town of Marburg 91 years ago today – June 17, 1934 – a speech conceived and initially drafted likely in May of that year by Jung, according to historian Roshan Magub’s careful research. 

Jung then revised the text during late May and early June with input from a tight circle of his like-minded political allies built up during Jung’s career as a right-wing pundit, political theorist, author and public speaker. You can review some key paragraphs from the Marburg speech here.

Why suddenly ghostwrite a stridently anti-Nazi address for your boss? Magub speculates that Jung’s likely goal was to, by amping up public criticism of Hitler and his party, catalyze closer coordination among his relatively small conservative political faction and other anti-Nazi, politically-conservative elements in German military circles and the German parliament. 

If that was indeed Jung’s goal, then he only half succeeded (as will be summarized below); per contemporary critics of Jung cited by Magub, the speech did provide some short-term rhetorical momentum for Hitler’s political opponents. But there had not been nearly enough backrooms groundwork in advance of Marburg by Jung and his political friends to coordinate, for example, with dissident right-wing officers or their conservative allies in the German parliament and spark meaningful unified political action.

Jung was hardly a stranger to deep political intrigue. His credibility among staunch German conservatives rested not only on his status as a well-known political commentator, but also for him being widely known as the organizer, in 1924, of a paramilitary team that assassinated Franz Josef Heinz-Orbis. Orbis was reviled among German nationalists for leading a post-World War 1 effort to carve out an independent state from Germany’s Rhineland. Jung and other nationalist-conservatives saw this separatist impulse as a deadly attack on Germany’s territorial integrity. 

FRANZ von PAPEN

As the date of Papen’s appearance in Marburg approached, Jung’s mind was focused on practical problems rather than grand political actions. One problem that Jung and his friends faced was how to ensure that Papen – a slippery opportunist – did not dilute the “final” version of the speech with last-minute edits. As Roshan Magub reconstructs the incident – 

Fearing that Papen might want to alter certain parts of the speech (although it was his habit to only make a few insignificant alterations to the speeches Jung drafted for him), care was taken to keep him in the dark about its contents. [Papen] was only given the speech to read as he boarded the train to Marburg … [A political aide accompanying Papen] was able to stop Papen from making any alterations by telling him that the speech had already been printed and copies released to the international press.

The aide wasn’t exaggerating about the international distribution angle. As Magub reveals, prior to Papen’s delivery, “[o]ne thousand copies of the speech [had been] printed [and several of these] sent abroad to Switzerland, France, Holland, and Luxemburg before June 17.” 

And on the day of the Marburg speech, Hubert von Bose of Papen’s political staff managed to get a summary of the speech shared widely with the German press, hoping to amplify its message. Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, as Magub points out, Papen was given permission to deliver the speech live on German news radio. 

The speech was well-received by its immediate audience, and was covered widely in the broader European media. While it did not, as noted earlier, lead to further concrete political action against the Nazis, the Nazis were not prepared to risk some other opposition figure attempting a second, better-planned Marburg. 

As Magub illustrates, to avoid a repetition of Papen’s speech, the Nazis quickly tightened up their censorship of the news to limit references to Marburg. Their agents also investigated the origins of the speech. To illustrate how the net closed in over Jung, Magub summarizes several ominous entries from the 1934 diary of Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, that give us a sense of the investigation’s rapid progress after the speech was delivered:

June 18 –  “Papen has given a fine speech for the moaners and faultfinders. Completely against us… Who drafted the speech? Where is the rogue? I ban the further publication of the speech on Hitler’ s orders. Hitler is furious.” (emphasis added)

June 27 – “[Papen’s] speech [was] drafted by E. Jung. Compromising letters discovered. We must be watchful. If serious, then strike back immediately.”

July 4 – “[Papen’s] people have all been shot. Also Edgar Jung. That man deserved it.” (emphasis added”

As Goebbels’ diary gloats, Jung wasn’t the only member of Papen’s staff to be murdered. Von Papen’s chief of press relations, Herbert von Bose (an anti-Nazi, conservative confidant of Jung) was brutally shot as many as 10 times on June 30, after being detained by the Gestapo for purposes of interrogation. And Erich Klausener, an ally of Papen who reviewed the Marburg speech prior to its delivery and provided input to Jung, was also assassinated. 

As with other victims of Hitler’s 1934 “Night of the Long Knives” purge, there was no judicial process or trial for Jung, Bose or Klausener, as Magub reminds us; all were simply eliminated. Papen suffered no such unhappy fate; he made his political peace with the Nazi regime and went on to hold various foreign diplomatic postings.

One lasting lesson of Jung’s death for other resistance-minded German conservatives was that there was little point to trying to spark a mass rebellion against Hitler through speeches or other conventional political gambits. Instead, they would concentrate, as they came close to doing in 1944, on trying to physically eliminate Hitler as the necessary first step in any regime change effort. 

Roshan Magub’s fine book represents the first and for now the only book-length biography of Jung written in English. Well-researched and tightly-written, and backed by solid scholarship that draws directly from relevant German-language sources, Magub provides readers with a panoramic sense of a complex man and his shifting political aspirations, with the dramatic times in which he lived as backdrop. If you’re searching for a gripping summertime read to add to your Kindle, look no further than Magub’s superb book.