The murder of Walter Rathenau

Judaism, Summer, 1995 by Carole Fink

The next morning at 10:45, Rathenau set out to work later than usual. About a mile and a half from his villa in Grunewald his open car was overtaken and stopped by an automobile with three handsome young men in spanking new leather jackets. When Rathenau's car was halted, one man shot the foreign minister with a submachine gun, while the second threw a hand grenade whose explosion lifted the victim from his seat; the driver of the assassins' vehicle then sped away. Rathenau had been shot five times; his jaw and backbone were completely shattered. He died almost at once. He was fifty-four years old.(31)

Not since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln did a nation make such a lavish display of mourning. The funeral service was held in the Reichstag with an oration delivered by the president of the Republic. The funeral cortege with an honor guard and the rolling of drums passed under the Brandenburg Gate on the way to the Rathenau family grave. Almost a half-million Berliners witnessed the solemn procession. The trade unions declared a day of mourning, and 200,000 workers assembled before the castle in Berlin; there were also workers' parades in Hamburg, Munich, Chemnitz, Eberfeld, Essen, and Breslau.(32) World leaders responded with an outpouring of sympathy for the fallen leader.(33)

Behind the public facade were less auspicious responses to Rathenau's murder. According to Stefan Zweig, "panic broke out" among the noisy vacationers bathing that June weekend on the North Sea. The pacifist Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, who was on a speaking trip in Germany, warned that he too was on a "list," fled terrified back to Switzerland and never returned to Germany. On the streets of Berlin, the bourgeoisie decried the impact on the dollar-exchange. Because June 24 was the saint's day of John the Baptist -- one of the protectors of Prussian knighthood -- and because on the day after a huge monarchist rally took place in Potsdam, rumors raced through Berlin's working-class districts of an impending St. Bartholomew's night. The cinema director Fritz Lang claimed that he created his schizophrenic supercriminal Dr. Mabuse as a response to the senseless violence attached to Rathenau's murder.(34)

Privately, there was little sympathy for the victim. On the day after the murder, Friedrich Meinecke's fellow academics in Berlin raged over the communist menace to Germany. In Munich, Thomas Mann heard an eminent professor rejoice in "one less Jew!"(35) In Heidelberg, the Nobel prize-winning physics professor, Philip Lenard forbade his students to observe the day of Rathenau's burial and be "idle on account of a dead Jew." On his walks through the German capital, the Prague journalist Egon Erwin Kisch heard lawyers and government functionaries -- still sporting their Wilhelminian mustaches -- utter melodramatically "It's been done!"(36) And Kurt Tucholsky's newly invented vulgarian "Herr Wendriner" parodied the exasperation of solid German and Jewish businessmen with all the red flags, and the marching, and the huge and noisy lower-class demonstrations in Rathenau's name: Too much disorder over one pushy dead Jew!(37)