100 years ago, right-wing extremists murdered the liberal German foreign minister, Walther Rathenau. About a deep cut in the short life of the Weimar Republic and the parallels that can be drawn to right-wing terror today.
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Ron Steinke
The Weimar Republic had two dominant figures, as the writer and journalist Sebastian Haffner once wrote. One was Walther Rathenau, the colorful, liberal, Jewish German foreign minister. The other was Adolf Hitler. “Rathenau and Hitler,” the author wrote, “were the two phenomena that excited the imagination of the German masses to the extreme: the one through his incomprehensible culture, the other through his incomprehensible meanness.”