The year is 1922, a political murder has taken place. The victim is the Secretary of State. After their crime, which they committed on a June day in Berlin, the murderers are able to disappear unmolested. The police searched for them for weeks, finally they caught the men on a castle tower in the provinces. One dies from a police bullet, the other kills himself. The murdered minister is the most controversial of a series of men who are assassinated within a few months. All these assassinations are planned by a secret organization. Their goal is to foment unrest on the left, which is then to be met with a coup from the right to overthrow the republic’s hated democratic government.
Sounds badly constructed? Like the plot of a seven-part ARD investigative series, set in the Weimar Republic and written by a screenwriter with a penchant for conspiracy scenarios?
Plot to take down the Republic
But it was just as described above. It can be read in an enlightening, very precise and well-written book by the Berlin contemporary historian Martin Sabrow, who has meanwhile retired. In this new edition of his 1992 dissertation, he tells the not-so-well-known story of a right-wing secret society that, led by a charismatic and anti-democratic ex-naval officer, hatched a plot to abolish the Weimar Republic. The most prominent victim was their Jewish foreign minister, Walther Rathenau.
Rathenau, born in 1867, had been chairman of the supervisory board of AEG, which his father founded, an engineer, writer, esthete or, as Robert Musil put it, who in his “Man without Qualities” gave the character of Paul Arnheim Rathenau’s features: the “union of coal prices and Soul”.
Hatred of “fulfillment politicians”
Always controversial, derided by the republican press shortly after the war as “Jesus in tails”, persecuted by the right as a Jew and a man of the republic with slobbering hatred, the left-liberal Rathenau first became Minister for Reconstruction in May 1921 and then Foreign Minister in January 1922 in the government of the center politician Joseph Wirth. Both were “fulfillment politicians”; The reparations demands of the allied victorious powers laid down in the Versailles Treaty had to be met, which meant paying immense sums over decades: a total of 132 billion gold marks.
In anti-republic circles, as Sabrov writes, month by month Rathenau was seen more and more as the “incarnation of a Jewish-capitalist conspiracy.” It was those – civil servants, officers of the shrunken Reichswehr, pastors, doctors, that is, the middle class – whose financial situation gradually pulled the rug out from under their feet shortly after the war; their view of the world was clouded by the legend of the stab in the back, by anti-Semitism, ethnic thinking and hatred of democracy.
One person who did not want to come to terms with the republic from the start was the priest’s son and imperial lieutenant commander Hermann Ehrhardt. At the beginning of 1919, he set up a volunteer corps of former naval officers, which suppressed left-wing uprisings and the Munich Soviet Republic with particular brutality. In March 1920, the “Brigade Erhardt” took part in the counter-revolutionary Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch in Berlin; After that, their leader, who was admired by his men, went into hiding in Munich, which was seething with nationalism, and founded the organization Consul (OC). Martin Sabrow describes the militarily tight structure of this empire-wide, clandestinely organized conspiracy in cells with “a murderous secret society headquarters”. The OC was financed by industrialists and enemies of the republic in the bourgeoisie, nobility and military, who, like Erhardt, wanted to force a violent change in the political situation.
Assassination attempts on Erzberger and Scheidemann
Their first victim was former finance minister Matthias Erzberger, the man who, by signing the armistice of November 1918, had become the main enemy for many Germans, well into mainstream society. Two of Erhardt’s men killed him in August 1921 while walking in the Black Forest. The police tracked down the headquarters of the Consul organization, but the Munich police chief Pöhner himself protected the assassins and Ehrhardt. The next attack in early June 1922 was aimed at the social democrat Philipp Scheidemann, but failed due to the dilettantism of the two assassins. Scheidemann had proclaimed the republic on November 9, 1918, and he too hated the right wing.
Onlookers at the scene of the crime, Königsallee, corner of Wallotstraße: On the morning of June 24, 1922, Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau was murdered in Berlin-Grunewald on the way to the Foreign Office by members of the extreme right-wing organization Consul (OC).
(Photo: Scherl/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
On June 24, 1922, it hit Walther Rathenau. Two young World War II officers named Kern and Fischer killed the minister, who was driving to the Foreign Office in an open car without police protection, with a hand grenade and shots from a submachine gun. The killers escaped, but Erhardt’s plan failed: there was no general uprising of indignation from the left, no armed riots to which the OC’s trained-to-kill mercenaries could have responded with a coup to restore order.
There were riots in the Reichstag and fisticuffs against German nationalists. But the people remained mostly calm, but were shocked and outraged far into conservative circles. The day of the funeral service for the murdered man, with a million participants in Berlin alone and hundreds of thousands across the country, became a demonstration for the republic; a demonstration of sad, deeply disturbed people, because a great many were becoming aware that “the country was at the mercy of an unknown terrorist force,” said Sabrov. This was confirmed a few days later when the prominent Jewish publicist Maximilian Harden survived an attack.
Justice was blind in the right eye
Martin Sabrow describes the series of assassination attempts and the sometimes grotesque but ultimately successful hunt for Rathenau’s murderer in detail, profoundly and excitingly. In the second part of the book, he addresses the trial before the State Court of Leipzig against the accomplices of the dead murderers. At the instigation of the senior Reich attorney, the indictment had the crucial blemish of almost completely ignoring the role of the OC, including its state supporters and thus the conspiracy behind the murder; the proceedings only dealt with the act as such. Another lawsuit against the OC itself exonerated them comprehensively; the mastermind and “coup politician” Hermann Ehrhardt, “thanks to his later successful self-deprecation, has unjustly disappeared from the view of history,” as Sabrow writes, was not one of the accused. The overwhelmingly reactionary Weimar judiciary lived up to its reputation.
Martin Sabrow: The Rathenau Murder and the German Counter-Revolution. Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2022. 334 pages, 30 euros.
In the epilogue, Sabrov poses the question of the continuity of right-wing terror to the present day and states that “a striking trail of terror runs through the history of the Federal Republic”. This book about the counter-revolution can also be read in this way: as the beginning of a history of violence from the right triggered by the defeat in the First World War. However, Sabrow has good reasons to deny an “unbroken line of continuity” from the “Weimar right-wing putschism” to today’s right-wing terrorism. And unlike back then, right-wing terror hasn’t divided society since 1945. So far anyway.