Herbert von Bose

Herbert von Bose (16 March 1893 Straßburg – 30 June 1934 Berlin) was head of the press division of the Vice Chancellery (Reichsvizekanzlei) in Germany under Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen. A conservative opponent of the Nazi regime, Bose was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934.

During the First World War, Bose served as an Intelligence Officer in the Imperial German Army. After the war he continued to work in the field of intelligence gathering and espionage, first for the Black Reichswehr and later for the private Telegraph Union, a company owned by the politician and media mogul Alfred Hugenberg. In 1931 Bose was summoned to the Prussian State Ministry, where he was assigned to head the Press Department. On top of that he acted as a right-hand-man of the conservative politician Otto Schmidt-Hannover (DNVP). In the autumn of 1931 Bose organised the so-called "Harzburger Tagung" (Harzburg conference) a gathering of right-wing political forces including the Nazi Party, the DNVP, the Agrarian Federation, and the paramilitary Stahlhelm.

Although a confirmed anti-communist and skeptical about the functionality of democracy as a form of government, Bose at that time came to reject National Socialism as a possible cure for the political ailments of Germany on various grounds, not the least of which was his personal detestation of the Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler, whom he deemed a vulgar rabble-rouser.

In early 1933 Bose was appointed as Chief of the Press Division in the office of Hitler's Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen. Since Papen failed in the task he had been assigned by Reichspresident von Hindenburg, to act as a "chaperon" and corrective of Hitler and the other radicals in the government, Bose and other leading men on Papen's staff decided to take care of that task themselves. Together with his assistant Wilhelm von Ketteler, Papen's speech writer and spin doctor Edgar Jung, and Papen's aides Fritz Günther von Tschirschky and Hans Graf von Kageneck, Bose formed a pocket of resistance against the National Socialist system that was later referred to as "the vanguard of conservative resistance".

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