Walther Rathenau

Excerpt

...it is that we Germans have, properly speaking, no understanding of political tendencies. We are more or less educated in business, in science, in thought, but in politics we are about on the same level as the east Slavonic peasantry....such processes of thought as 'the police are to blame, the war conditions are to blame, the Prussians are to blame, the Jews are to blame, the English are to blame, the priests are to blame, the capitalists are to blame'--all these we quite understand.
—Die neue Gesellschaft (The New Society), Walther Rathenau, 1921

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Who was Walther Rathenau?

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Nazi propaganda depicting prominent Jewish figures (Photo)

Nazi-produced propaganda slide entitled "Leading Figures of the System." The image was presented during a lecture called "Jewry, Its Blood-based Essence in Past and Future," Part I in a series on Jewry, Freemasonry, and Bolshevism. Germany, circa 1936.

The slide features the portraits of six prominent Jewish political and cultural figures in Weimar Germany. Georg Bernhard, Rudolf Hilferding, and Walther Rathenau were among the authors whose works were targeted during the 1933 Nazi book burnings.

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• Library of Congress

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When students burned the books of Walter Rathenau (1867-1922) in 1933, they evoked the vicious antisemitism that had inspired his assassination 11 years earlier. Rathenau had been educated as an engineer and became experienced as executive officer of his family's electrical company. During the last half of World War I, he directed the Raw Materials Department in the German Ministry of War.

Rathenau represented the new German republic at a variety of diplomatic and treaty negotiations. He was in the German delegation at Versailles in 1919 and he negotiated the Rapallo Treaty with the Soviet Union in 1922. He also became foreign minister of Germany in 1922, the first Jew to hold a cabinet post in Germany. Rathenau won some reparations concessions from the victors of World War I and generally improved relationships between Germany and her former enemies.

Though a strong German patriot, he remained a liberal democrat and advocated socially minded correctives to some of the ills of the capitalist economy. As a Jew and a committed if conservative advocate of the Weimar Republic, Rathenau's very person was a lightning-rod for the hatred of those on the conservative and radical right who despised the Republic and hated Jews. Among the hateful ditties written about him was the following: "Erschlag den Walter Rathenau/ die gottverdammte Judensau" (Slay that Walter Rathenau/ the goddamned Jewish sow).

Less than six months after becoming foreign minister, Rathenau was slain by gunmen from a right-wing paramilitary group.