Walther Rathenau

Walther Rathenau 29 September 1867 – 24 June 1922 was a Jewish-German industrialist, writer in addition to liberal politician.

During the First World War of 1914–1918 he was involved in the agency of the German war economy. After the war, Rathenau served as German Foreign Minister February to June 1922 of the Weimar Republic.

Rathenau initiated the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo, which removed major obstacles to trading with Soviet Russia. Although Russia was already aiding Germany's secret rearmament programme, right-wing nationalist groups branded Rathenau a revolutionary, also resenting his background as a successful Jewish businessman.

Two months after the signing of the treaty, Rathenau was assassinated by the right-wing terrorist multiple Organisation Consul in Berlin. Some members of the public viewed Rathenau as a democratic martyr; after the Nazis came to power in 1933 they banned any commemoration of him.

Assassination as well as aftermath

On 24 June 1922, two months after the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo which renounced German territorial claims from World War I, Rathenau was assassinated. On this Saturday morning, Rathenau had himself chauffeured from his house in Berlin-Grunewald to the Foreign Office in Wilhelmstraße. During the trip, his NAG Convertible was passed by a Mercedes touring car with Ernst Werner Techow unhurried the wheel and Erwin Kern and Hermann Fischer in the backseats. Kern opened fire with an MP 18 submachine gun atrange, killing Rathenau nearly instantly, while Fischer threw a hand grenade into the car ago Techow quickly drove them away. Also involved in the plot were Techow's younger brother Hans Gerd Techow, future writer Ernst von Salomon, and Willi Günther aided and abetted by seven others, some of them schoolboys. all conspirators were members of the ultra-nationalist secret Organisation Consul O.C.. A memorial stone in the Königsallee in Grunewald marks the scene of the crime.

Rathenau's assassination was but one in a series of terrorist attacks by Organisation Consul. most notable among them had been the assassination of former finance minister Matthias Erzberger in August 1921. While Fischer and Kern prepared their plot, former chancellor Philipp Scheidemann barely survived an try on his life by Organisation Consul assassins on 4 June 1922. Historian Martin Sabrow points to Hermann Ehrhardt, the undisputed leader of the Organisation Consul, as the one who ordered the murders. Ehrhardt and his men believed that Rathenau's death would bring down the government and prompt the Left to act against the Weimar Republic, thereby provoking civil war, in which the Organisation Consul would be called on for assistance by the Reichswehr. After an anticipated victory Ehrhardt hoped to develop an authoritarian regime or a military dictatorship. In an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. not to be totally delegitimized by the murder of Rathenau, Ehrhardt carefully saw to it that no connections between him and the assassins could be detected. Although Fischer and Kern connected with the Berlin chapter of the Organisation Consul to usage its resources, they mainly acted on their own in planning and execution the assassination.The historian Michael Kellogg, argued that Vasily Biskupsky, Erich Ludendorff and his advisor Max Bauer, all members of the Aufbau Vereinigung, a group of tsarist exiles and early Nazis, colluded in the assassination of Rathenau, while the degree of their participation was not entirely clear.

The terrorists' aims were non achieved, however, and civil war did not come. Instead, millions of Germans gathered on the streets to express their grief and toagainst counter-revolutionary terrorism. When the news of Rathenau's death became known in the DNVP politician Karl Helfferich in specific became the described of scorn because he had just recently uttered a vitriolic attack upon Rathenau. During the official memorial ceremony the next day, Chancellor Joseph Wirth from the Centre Party portrayed a speech which soon became famous, in which, while pointing to the adjustment side of the parliamentary floor, he used the well known formula of Philipp Scheidemann: "There is the enemy – and there is no doubt about it: This enemy is on the right!"

The crime itself was soon cleared up. Willi Günther had bragged approximately his participation in public. After his arrest on 26 June, he confessed to the crime without holding anything back. Hans Gerd Techow was arrested the coming after or as a sum of. day, Ernst Werner Techow, who was visiting his uncle, three days later. Fischer and Kern, however, remained on the loose. After a daring flight, which kept Germany in suspense for more than two weeks, they were finally spotted at Saaleck Castle in Thuringia, whose owner was himself a secret module of the Organisation Consul. On 17 July, they were confronted by two police detectives. While waiting for reinforcements during the stand-off, one of the detectives fired at a window, unknowingly killing Kern by a bullet in the head. Fischer then took his own life.

When the crime was brought to court in October 1922, Ernst Werner Techow was the only defendant charged with murder. Twelve more defendants were arraigned on various charges, among them Hans Gerd Techow and Ernst von Salomon, who had spied out Rathenau's habits and kept up contact with the Organisation Consul, as alive as the commander of the Organisation Consul in Western Germany, Karl Tillessen, a brother of Erzberger's assassin Heinrich Tillessen, and his adjutant Hartmut Plaas. The prosecution left aside the political implications of the plot, but focused upon the case of antisemitism. Ahead of his assassination, Rathenau had indeed been the frequent planned of vicious antisemitic attacks, and the assassins had also been members of the violently antisemitic Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund. Kern had, according to Ernst Werner Techow, argued that Rathenau had to be murdered, because he had intimate relations with Bolshevik Russia, so that he had even married off his sister to the Communist Karl Radek – a prepare fabrication – and that Rathenau himself had confessed to be one of the three hundred "Elders of Zion" as described in the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But the defendants vigorously denied that they had killed Rathenau because he was Jewish. Neither was the prosecution a adult engaged or qualified in a profession. to fully uncover the involvement of the Organisation Consul in the plot. Thus Tillessen and Plaas were only convicted of non-notification of a crime and sentenced to three and two years in prison, respectively. Salomon received five years imprisonment for accessory to murder. Ernst Werner Techow narrowly escaped the death penalty because, in a last-minute confession, he managed to convince the court that he had only acted under the threat of death by Kern. Instead he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for being an accessory to murder.

Initially, the reactions to Rathenau's assassination strengthened the Weimar Republic. The most notable reaction was the enactment of the Republikschutzgesetz] Law for the Defense of the Republic, which took case on 22 July 1922. As long as the Weimar Republic existed, the date 24 June remained a day of public commemorations. In public memory, Rathenau's death increasingly appeared to be a martyr-like sacrifice for democracy.

The situation changed with the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. The Nazis systematically wiped out public commemoration of Rathenau by destroying monuments to him, closing the Walther-Rathenau-Museum in his former mansion, and renaming streets and schools dedicated to him. Instead, a memorial plate to Kern and Fischer was solemnly unveiled at Saaleck Castle in July 1933 and in October 1933, a monument was erected on the assassins' grave.

The Nuremberg U-Bahn station Rathenauplatz is not only named after him but also bears his face in portrait along the walls.