Walther Rathenau

Walther Rathenau
Foreign Minister of Germany
In office 1 February – 24 June 1922
President	Friedrich Ebert
Chancellor	Joseph Wirth
Preceded by	Joseph Wirth (acting)
Succeeded by	Joseph Wirth (acting)
Personal details
Born	(1867-09-29)29 September 1867 Berlin, North German Confederation
Died	24 June 1922(1922-06-24) (aged 54) Berlin, Weimar Republic
Political party	German Democratic Party
Relations	Emil Rathenau (father)
Profession	Industrialist, politician, writer

Walther Rathenau (29 September 1867 – 24 June 1922) was a German industrialist, writer and politician who served as foreign minister of Germany from February to June 1922.

Rathenau was the son of Emil Rathenau, a prominent Jewish businessman and founder of the electrical engineering company Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG). After obtaining a doctorate in physics from the University of Berlin, he held a number of industry positions before joining the AEG board, establishing himself as a leading industrialist in the late German Empire. In 1915, he became the chairman of AEG upon his father's death. During the First World War, he was heavily involved in the organisation of the German war economy and headed the War Raw Materials Department.

After the war, Rathenau helped found the German Democratic Party and was a influential figure in the postwar Weimar Republic. In 1921, he was appointed minister of reconstruction by Chancellor Joseph Wirth, and a year later he became foreign minister. Rathenau negotiated the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo, which normalised relations and strengthened economic ties between Germany and Soviet Russia. The agreement, along with Rathenau's insistence that Germany fulfill its obligations under the Treaty of Versailles, led right-wing nationalist groups (including a nascent Nazi Party) to brand him part of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy.

Two months after the signing of the treaty, Rathenau was assassinated by the ultra-nationalist paramilitary group Organisation Consul in Berlin. His death was followed by national mourning as well as widespread demonstrations against counter-revolutionary terrorism, which briefly strengthened the Weimar Republic. Rathenau came to be viewed as a democratic martyr during the Weimar era. Following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, all commemorations of Rathenau were systematically banned.

Early life

Rathenau was born in Berlin to Emil Rathenau, a prominent Jewish businessman and founder of the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), an electrical engineering company, and Mathilde Nachmann.

He studied physics, chemistry, and philosophy in Berlin and Strasbourg, and received a doctorate in physics in 1889 after studying under August Kundt. His German Jewish heritage and his accumulated wealth were both factors in establishing his deeply divisive reputation in German politics at a time of increasing widespread antisemitism in Germany.

He summed up his thoughts on growing up Jewish in Germany; communicating how his patriotism and loyalty to his country were no different than that of any fellow German regardless of religion or ethnicity:

I am a German of Jewish origin. My people are the German people, my home is Germany, my faith is German faith, which stands above all denominations.

He worked as a technical engineer in a Swiss aluminium factory, and then as a manager in a small electro-chemical firm in Bitterfeld, where he conducted experiments in electrolysis. He returned to Berlin and joined the AEG board in 1899, becoming a leading industrialist in the late German Empire and early Weimar Republic periods. In 1903 his younger and much more entrepreneurial brother Erich Rathenau died. Heartbroken, his father had to be satisfied with Walther's help instead. Walther Rathenau was a successful industrialist: in only a decade he set up power stations in Manchester, Buenos Aires, and Baku. AEG acquired ownership of a streetcar company in Madrid; and in East Africa he purchased a British firm. In total he was involved with 84 companies worldwide. AEG was particularly praised for vertical integration methods and a strong emphasis on supply chain management. Rathenau developed an expertise in business restructuring, turning companies around. High organizational capabilities made his company very rich, and it produced the standards for new chemicals development, such as acetone in Manchester. He made large profits from commercial lending on a wide industrial scale, and those profits were reinvested in capital and assets.

During his time in German South West Africa, Rathenau condemned the treatment of the Herero people, referring to the Herero and Namaqua genocide as "the greatest atrocity that has ever been brought about by German military policy." He condemned "system of deportation and concentration camps," described the "present position of the native" as having the "outward appearance of slavery."

Supply chains for the World War

An experienced journalist, Rathenau published in the Berliner Tageblatt an article accusing his own country of manipulating politics in Vienna. As the dual monarchy's relations with Russia drifted, the paper described a secret conspiracy at work in Moltke's War department in which he had taken part. During World War I his opinions hardened. He held senior posts in the Raw Materials Department of the War Ministry and became chairman of AEG upon his father's death in 1915. Rathenau played a key role in convincing the War Ministry to set up the War Raw Materials Department (Kriegsrohstoffabteilung, KRA), of which he was put in charge from August 1914 to March 1915 and established the fundamental policies and procedures. His senior staff were on loan from industry. The KRA focused on raw materials threatened by the British blockade, as well as supplies from occupied Belgium and France. It set prices and regulated the distribution to vital war industries. It began the development of substitute raw materials, developing supply chains to bring peace and for regime change within Germany. The KRA suffered many inefficiencies caused by the complexity and selfishness encountered from commerce, industry, and the government itself.

Personal character

Rathenau in 1921

Rathenau wrote about personal and social responsibility to the community at a time when solidarity was required to keep the peace. His characteristics were courage, vision, imagination, tenacity and creativity; yet he insisted technology come to the aid of manual labourers. So one of the joys of work included "pleasure from profit" to elevate society. According to one biographer he is said to have identified a sense of inferiority in society due to his Jewishness, writing that he:

realised completely for the first time that he had come into this world as a second-class citizen and that no amount of ability and merit could ever free him from this condition.

One heavy criticism which he bore was the implication that Jews could never put Germany first; the idea that the Jews were "our misfortune", as the German nationalist historian Heinrich Treitschke wrote, led to the proliferation from 1880s of anti-Semitic parties. There were no Jewish officers in the whole Prussian Army – the ruling-class in the Imperial Officer Corps was both blatantly and latently anti-Semitic, eventually supporting the Nazis' anti-Semitic policies. He was a strong proponent of full and radical assimilation. Rathenau's views on assimilation were extreme compared with other Jewish writers of his time:

Strange sight! In the midst of German life [there is] an isolated, strange human tribe, resplendently and conspicuously adorned, hot-blooded and animated in its behavior. An Asian horde on the soil of Brandenburg ... In close association with each other, strictly closed off from the outside − thus they live in a semivoluntary, invisible ghetto, not a living member of the people [Volk], but a foreign organism in its body."

This type of polemic would have normally been considered antisemitic if the author had not identified himself as Jewish. According to Rathenau's conception of assimilation as "the conscious self-education of a race to assimilate to outside demands" and for Jews to become not mere "imitation Germans, but Jews who are German by nature and education".

After Versailles (1919) he founded a "League for Industry", an offshoot of internationalism that blamed German defeat on a lack of industrial readiness. He wished to exculpate the blame for Germany's war guilt articulated through an acquaintance with Colonel House.

Postwar statesman

Rathenau was a moderate liberal in politics, and after World War I, he was one of the founders of the German Democratic Party (German: Deutsche Demokratische Partei, DDP), but he moved to the left in the advent of post-war chaos. Passionate about rights of social equality, he rejected state ownership of industry and instead advocated greater worker participation in the management of companies. His ideas were influential in postwar governments. He was put forward as a socialist candidate for first President; but on standing in the Reichstag was dismissed amid "rows and shrieks of laughter" which visibly upset the man. Ebert's election by the Left failed to heal the deep rifts and social divisions in German society that occurred throughout the Weimar. Rathenau advised that a small town in central Germany was the wrong place for the capital and seat of Government. But his own adequacy was under-appreciated; immediately giving rise to extreme right-wing organizations within months of the Communist-inspired Spartacist Revolt, "the product of a state in which for centuries no one has ruled who was not a member of, or a convert to military feudalism...," he told the Reichstag, at once deploring the foundation of the German Fatherland Party in 1917. In 1918 he established the ZAG living through his philosophy of Deutsche Gemeinwirtschaft a collective economic community.

Rathenau encouraged free traders and believed in the efficacy of "preparedness and directional efficiency". AEG was influential: his colleague Wichard von Moellendorff was appointed as Undersecretary of the Reich Economy Office; for a time in July 1919 they worked closely for Weimar with republican Rudolf Wissell. But Hindenburg's technocratic rational economic Programme was borrowed; while Rathenau, being democratic, warned against short-termism. Berlin's March Days was a consequence of the internal struggle between Finance and Economic ministries. On 20 February 1919 he proposed workers councils. The plan for a Socialist League of nations was overtly pro-Union mocked as the "Paris League" – a throwback to the Second Communist International – they challenged openly for democratic ideas. But a rapprochement with Soviet Union was inspired by Rathenau; it tried to prevent an expansive 'Greater Germany'.

Rathenau was appointed Minister of Reconstruction, and in May 1921 held a second meeting with Lloyd George and the Reparations Committee. He established good relations with Aristide Briand who praised "a strong, healthy, booming Germany". The era of Erfüllungspolitik was high, altruistic self-confidence; he shared a pre-war fascination for the Hegelian Complex for a corporate Germany chastised by a reverence to a Supreme Being. He was wary of allied decadence, complacent, corrosive of an innocent romanticism expanded into mysticism. His ideas were challenged as "objectively impossible"; Weimar lacked clarity and leadership, while Rathenau was deterministic, and robust over the details. A Levée en masse would be part of this utilitarianism that bestrode his Menschen philosophies. This contradistinction about an "unravelled" Versailles which was incompatible with Fulfillment and the role of Reconstruction. Bravely Rathenau held out against the partition of Poland, despite Erzberger's assassination; and threats for extreme National Bolshevists when he joined Joseph Wirth's government after Cannes on 31 January 1922 led to a horrible fear that his days were numbered.

In 1922, Rathenau became Foreign Minister. Writing before the Genoa Conference that concern for his personal safety was prescient of a foreboding for his own death. His insistence that Germany should fulfill its obligations under the Treaty of Versailles, but work for a revision of its terms, infuriated extreme German nationalists. He also angered such extremists by negotiating the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union, which was signed on 16 April 1922, although the treaty implicitly recognized secret German–Soviet collaboration begun in 1921 that provided for the rearmament of Germany, including German-owned aircraft being manufactured in Russian territory. The leaders of the (still obscure) National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated NSDAP) and other extremist groups falsely claimed he was part of a "Jewish-Communist conspiracy", despite the fact that he was a liberal German nationalist who had bolstered the country's recent war effort. The British politician Robert Boothby wrote of him, "He was something that only a German Jew could simultaneously be: a prophet, a philosopher, a mystic, a writer, a statesman, an industrial magnate of the highest and greatest order, and the pioneer of what has become known as 'industrial rationalization'." Despite his desire for economic and political co-operation between Germany and the Soviet Union, Rathenau remained skeptical of the methods of the Soviets:

We cannot use Russia's methods, as they only and at best prove that the economy of an agrarian nation can be leveled to the ground; Russia's thoughts are not our thoughts. They are, as it is in the spirit of the Russian city intelligentsia, unphilosophical, and highly dialectic; they are passionate logic based on unverified suppositions. They assume that a single good, the destruction of the capitalist class, weighs more than all other goods, and that poverty, dictatorship, terror and the fall of civilization must be accepted to secure this one good. Ten million people must die to free ten million people from the bourgeoisie is regarded as a harsh but necessary consequence. The Russian idea is compulsory happiness, in the same sense and with the same logic as the compulsory introduction of Christianity and the Inquisition.

The question of war reparations vexed Rathenau: Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles imposed repayments that would take Germany decades to repay. Expunging war guilt, converting it into financial and economic responsibility was critical to relations among the Big Four of World War I (Britain, France, Italy and the USA). Yet Rathenau was unable to convince Germans of its applicability. He talked in his "apocalyptic way about society, politics and the problems of responsibility." He was persuasive; the Entente would recognise, he urged, that Germany had to be "capable of discharging its obligations."

Assassination and aftermath

Rathenau's villa on the Königsallee

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 behind the wheel and Erwin Kern and Hermann Fischer in the backseats. Kern opened fire with an MP 18 submachine gun at close range, killing Rathenau almost instantly, while Fischer threw a hand grenade into the car before 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.

Hermann Ehrhardt (left, sitting in the car) during the Kapp Putsch in Berlin, 1920

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 attempt 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 help by the Reichswehr. After an anticipated victory Ehrhardt hoped to establish an authoritarian regime or a military dictatorship. In order not to be completely 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 use its resources, they mainly acted on their own in planning and carrying out 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.

State memorial ceremony with Rathenau's laid-out coffin in the Reichstag, 27 June 1922

The terrorists' aims were not achieved, however, and civil war did not come. Instead, millions of Germans gathered on the streets to express their grief and demonstrate against counter-revolutionary terrorism. When the news of Rathenau's death became known in the Reichstag, the session turned into turmoil. DNVP politician Karl Helfferich in particular became the target 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 made a speech which soon became famous, in which, while pointing to the right 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 about 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 following 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 member 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.

Memorial service for Rathenau, June 1923

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 well 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 issue of antisemitism. Ahead of his assassination, Rathenau had indeed been the frequent target 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 complete 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. The prosecution was unable 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 a death sentence when, 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.

Unveiling of the first Commemorative Plaque at the scene of the crime in June 1929. Former chancellor Joseph Wirth and Defence Minister Wilhelm Groener in the first row

Initially, the reactions to Rathenau's assassination strengthened the Weimar Republic. The most notable reaction was the enactment of the Law for the Protection of the Republic, which took effect 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.

Fictional portrayal

Rathenau is generally acknowledged to be, in part, the basis for the German noble and industrialist Paul Arnheim, a character in Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities. Rathenau also appears as the ghostly subject of a Nazi seance in a famous scene in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. In 2017, the events and aftermath of Rathenau's assassination were depicted in the first episode of the National Geographic series Genius.

Works

• Reflektionen (1908)
• Zur Kritik der Zeit (1912)
• Zur Mechanik des Geistes (1913)
• Von kommenden Dingen (1917)
• Vom Aktienwesen. Eine geschäftliche Betrachtung (1917)
• An Deutschlands Jugend (1918)
• Die neue Gesellschaft (1919) The New Society translated by Arthur Windham, (1921) New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.
• Der neue Staat (1919)
• Der Kaiser (1919)
• Kritik der dreifachen Revolution (1919)
• Was wird werden (1920, a utopian novel)
• Gesammelte Schriften (6 volumes)
• Gesammelte Reden (1924)
• Briefe (1926, 2 volumes)
• Neue Briefe (1927)
• Politische Briefe (1929)

See also

• Contributions to liberal theory
• 1920s Berlin
• Liberalism

References

Secondary sources

• Brecht, Arnold. “Walther Rathenau and the German People.” The Journal of Politics 10, no. 1 (1948): 20–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/2125816.
• Berger, Stefan, Inventing the Nation: Germany, London: Hodder, 2004.
• Dallas, Gregor (2000). 1918: War and Peace. London: John Murray..
• Felix, David (1971). Walther Rathenau and the Weimar Republic: The Politics of Reparations. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-1-4214-3553-4.
• Gilbert, Sir Martin, The First World War: A Complete History (London, 1971)
• Henderson, W. O. (1951). "Walther Rathenau: A Pioneer of the Planned Economy". The Economic History Review. 4 (1): 98–108. doi:10.2307/2591660. ISSN 0013-0117. JSTOR 2591660.
• Himmer, Robert (1976). "Rathenau, Russia, and Rapallo". Central European History. 9 (2): 146–183. doi:10.1017/S000893890001815X. ISSN 0008-9389. JSTOR 4545767. S2CID 145269033.
• Kessler, Harry (1969). Walther Rathenau: His Life and Work. New York: Fertig.
• Kollman, Eric C. (1952). "Walther Rathenau and German Foreign Policy: Thoughts and Actions". The Journal of Modern History. 24 (2): 127–142. doi:10.1086/237497. ISSN 0022-2801. JSTOR 1872561. S2CID 153956310.
• Pois, Robert A., "Walther Rathenau's Jewish Quandary", Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (1968), Vol. 13, pp 120–131.
• Sabrow, Martin (1994). Der Rathenaumord. Rekonstruktion einer Verschwörung gegen die Republik von Weimar (in German). Munich: Oldenbourg. ISBN 978-3-486-64569-9. Retrieved 27 July 2012.
• Strachan, Hew, The First World War: Volume I: To Arms (2001) pp. 1014–1049, on Rathenau and KRA in the war
• Volkov, Shulamit (2012). Walther Rathenau: The Life of Weimar's Fallen Statesman. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-17847-0.
• Struve, Walter. Elites Against Democracy: Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890-1933. Princeton University Press, 1973. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x11bp.
• Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, The German Empire 1871–1918, Leamington: Berg, 1985.
• Williamson, D.G., "Walther Rathenau and the K.R.A. August 1914 – March 1915", in Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte (1978), issue 11, pp. 118–136.

Primary sources

• Vossiche Zeitung – a newspaper
• Tagebuch 1907–22 (Düsseldorf, 1967)
• Count Harry Kessler, Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler (1918–1937) Grove Press (New York, 1999)
• Rathenau, W., Die Mechanisierung der Welt (Fr.) (Paris, 1972)
• Rathenau, W., Schriften und Reden (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1964)
• Rathenau, W., The Sacrifice to the Eumenides (1913)
• Walther Rathenau: Industrialist, Banker, Intellectual, And Politician; Notes And Diaries 1907–1922. Hartmut P. von Strandmann (ed.), Hilary von Strandmann (translator). Clarendon Press, 528 pages, in English. October 1985. ISBN 978-0-19-822506-5 (hardcover).

Further reading

• "Rede: 100. Jahrestag der Ermordung von Walther Rathenau". Der Bundespräsident (in German). 22 June 2022. Retrieved 1 December 2022.

External links

• Walther Rathenau Gesellschaft e. V. (in German)
• Works by Walther Rathenau at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Walther Rathenau at Internet Archive
• Works by Walther Rathenau at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Speech by German President Friedrich Ebert at Rathenau's burial (in German)
• Newspaper clippings about Walther Rathenau in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW