HAIFA, Israel — In postwar Germany, the humiliating burden of enormous contributions created an enormous economic crisis, hyperinflation, and impoverishment. Everything was devalued and the demand for antisemitism grew. During the Weimar Republic, articles accusing Jews of pushing the country into war and losing it were increasing in number. In 1922, the best candidate for this kind of accusation was the Jew Walter Rathenau.
Rathenau was one of the most educated men of his time. He was a major industrialist, financier, wealthy man, writer, philosopher, publicist, artist, doctor of science, electrochemical engineer, president of the General Electric Company, minister of reconstruction, and finally minister of foreign affairs.
At the beginning of World War I Rathenau organized a new National Economy Department of the War Ministry, at the head of which he was for eight months. He created Europe’s first state economic system subordinated to the interests of the war machine. He created dozens of state-owned companies and hired hundreds of capable scientists, economists, and administrators, without whom Germany would have lost the war within months. Rathenau was well aware of the weakness of the German war machine at the beginning of World War I ‒ the shortage of raw materials, which inevitably, as soon as England organized a blockade, would make itself felt. Rathenau implemented the invention of Nobel laureate chemistry professor Fritz Haber, a German patriot and baptized Jew, by building fertilizer and explosives plants based on the scientist’s invention of a method for extracting ammonia from the air. The saltpeter needed to extract ammonia from the ground was not available in Germany, which was blockaded by the British navy. Without a system of such extraordinary measures, Germany would probably have been defeated in a few months.
Unlike Haber, Rathenau remained a Jew and stressed his Jewishness throughout. He wrote: “There is a painful moment in the childhood of every German Jew which he remembers throughout his life: when he realizes for the first time that he enters the world as a second-class citizen and that no amount of activity or merit will change this. […] By changing my faith, I could eliminate the discrimination against me, but in doing so I would only be pandering to the ruling classes in their lawlessness. I remain in the Jewish religious community, because I do not want to shy away from reproaches and difficulties, and I have had enough of both so far.”
Rathenau was the outstanding statesman that Germany, ravaged, humiliated and robbed by the Treaty of Versailles, needed. Journalist Sebastian Haffner in his book A Biography of a German. Memories of 1914 – 1933 (published in 2000, but written in 1939) describes Rathenau as follows: “Neither before nor since in the German Republic has there been a politician who has so influenced the imagination of the masses and the youth. […] When reading his speeches, everyone felt that, regardless of the content, there was a deep subtext of rebuke, insistence and call – the speech of a prophet. Many began to seek out and read his books (myself included): they, too, contained discreet in form but profound in meaning, striving to reassure and at the same time persuade, demanding and hopeful.”
Rathenau made Europe respect him, but Germany disbelieved one of its greatest patriots, dismissing him as a Jew. True to Prussian ideals as a hard worker, patriot, man of action and duty, Rathenau was more German than most Germans. Attracted by his love for a Germany that was experiencing the tragedy of a society shattered by military defeat, drained by economic corrosion, the payment of gigantic reparations to the victors, and the general European mockery of the losing side, Rathenau was acutely aware of his duality: he was a leader and an outsider simultaneously. He was the leader of German foreign policy and a major economic magnate with a lot of influence in the country ‒ in industry and in politics. At the same time, he was a leper Jew, an “enemy in disguise.”
Rathenau’s personality was appealing to many Germans and repugnant to an even greater number of them. Ready to serve his country, he so exalted himself above German society that the vast majority of his contemporaries were unable to understand him. Haffner tries to recreate his paradoxical and grandiose personality: “He should undoubtedly be included among the five or six great men of the century. He was a revolutionary of the aristocrats, an economist of the idealists, a German patriot of the Jews, a citizen of the world of the German patriots. […] He was educated enough to rise above his education because he was rich; he was rich enough to rise above his wealth because he was a citizen of the world; he was a citizen of the world enough to rise above the vanity of the world. It was not difficult to imagine him not only as a German foreign minister when he assumed office in 1922, but also as, for example, a German philosopher in 1800, the head of an international financial empire in 1850, or even as a wise rabbi or a hermit. He combined the unconnected, and the most dangerous and risky way, each time doing what was only possible to do here and now.”
In History of the Jews, Paul Johnson wrote of Rathenau: “He believed passionately in assimilation. He thought that German anti-Semitism was a fundamental creation of the aristocrats and that it would disappear with the end of aristocratic leadership, to be replaced by a new ruling industrial class.” In Rathenau’s view, the complete and final assimilation of the Jews would come soon, with the victory of rational forces. What Rathenau failed to notice is that one of the results of the German defeat in World War I was the onslaught of the mobs. The old aristocracy was indeed weakening, but a new “aristocracy” of racially superior Aryan Jews was forming.
Rathenau led a double life as a German and a Jew. He was torn by contradictions. Stefan Zweig describes Rathenau’s estrangement this way: “His true life consisted in the spiritual, in activity, in perpetual wandering, and perhaps the strange homelessness, the great abstraction of the Jewish spirit, was never more fully expressed than in this man, who subconsciously defended himself against the intellectuality of his spirit and with all his will with all his predilections reached for an invented, illusory German, moreover, a Prussian ideal, and yet at the same time always felt himself to be a man from the other shore, understood that his spiritual essence was alien.”
At 10:45 on the morning of June 24, 1922, Walter Rathenau, 54-year-old Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic, was murdered on the doorstep of his home in the Grunewald district of Berlin. He was shot and a grenade thrown at him. A few months later, in October 1922, Ernst Teschow, a student of 21, who had been driving the car in which the killers escaped, was tried as their accomplice. The murderers, officer Erwin Kern and engineer Hermann Fischer, were dead by then: one died in a shootout with the police, the other committed suicide. All of the terrorists belonged to the underground, nationalist, right-wing extremist organization “Consul.”
All members of the group, young fanatics, were absolutely convinced not only that Rathenau was acting on behalf of the “Elders of Zion,” but that he himself was one of them. The time of the murder coincided with the summer solstice. The chairman of the court at the Teschow trial spoke of Rathenau’s “sacrificial death.” He was referring to a sacrifice in the name of progress, but the minister turned out to be a human sacrifice to an ancient Germanic deity. The famous forgery of the tsarist guard, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was beginning its bloody march. Rathenau was one of its first victims. The imagination of the murderers was consumed by the Protocols. Both World War I and the German defeat in it were incriminated by German nationalists against the Jews. Teshow’s chosen method of defense was simple and clear: they executed the Jew Rathenau because they considered him a member of the Council of the Elders of Zion, who had set out to take over the world.
Rathenau was killed not by three nationalist-terrorists, but by a mob ‒ a crude, drugged-up crowd, convinced that he belonged to the hostile “Elders of Zion” of Germany, who hated the eminent outsider. What Rathenau did not foresee was that he was walking confidently toward his assassination. About five hundred thousand people came to the Berlin cemetery to bid farewell to Rathenau. On that day, Germany was parting with one of the greatest statesmen in its history. It bid farewell not only to an outstanding national leader, but also to the ideas he represented ‒ internationalism, tolerance, respect for man, concern for people and country, pragmatism, a great culture and ancestral heritage.
A torchlit procession of misanthropists began, a cult of violence and the worship of the monster of nationalism emerged. Germany was changing the national skin of a cultured country, a land of great philosophers, writers and musicians, into that of a monster. It discarded the unnecessary cosmopolitan, liberal, rational man, and brought to the surface the mob, the rabble, and brought to power irrational, uneducated people, “super-humans,” who were “super anti-humans.” Many who came to the cemetery to mourn the murdered minister wept not only for the murdered leader, a man and a patriot, but also for the lost values and the passing of civilization. Rathenau suffered from the illusion that a Jew could be a successful, useful, and recognized leader in Germany.
Germany did not recognize the Jew Rathenau as its leader. Eleven years after his assassination, however, it crowned the illiterate fanatic Hitler, who wrote the blackest pages of its history. Rathenau represented the mind of Germany and the way in which it could slowly emerge from the post-war impasse. But society longed for a quick deliverance, a lightning-fast exit from a humiliating situation, from an economic crisis. German society needed miracles. It thought irrationally. It needed nationalist wizards, not rationalist cosmopolitans. Rathenau towered over society, over history. The people he set out to save, to lead out of a humiliating and distressing situation, did not come to understand the greatness of this extraordinary man.
In March 1922 Einstein and German Zionist leader Kurt Blumenfeld arrived at the minister’s house at eight o’clock in the evening and left at 1 a.m. They persuaded Rathenau to resign. Blumenfeld said that Rathenau’s decision to accept the ministerial appointment was a disaster not only for him, but also for German Jewry. The Zionist leader tried to convince Rathenau that not only the Jews of Germany, but every Jew in the world was perceived as responsible for Rathenau’s actions. Blumenfeld was proving to his opponent that the Jews had no right to conduct the policies of any nation but their own. Einstein had long since concluded that it was insane for a Jew to play such a large role in German politics. He felt that the minister was risking his life and feared losing his friend.
Rathenau replied to his guests: “I am a German of Jewish origin […]. My people are German people, my homeland is Germany. My religion is that the German faith is above all religions. […] I am the right man in the right place. Why can’t I repeat what Disraeli did? […] I am trying to destroy the borders created by anti-Semites to isolate Jews.” To Herzl, Rathenau said: “The Jews are no longer a nation and will never be a nation. German Jews are now a Germanic tribe, like Saxons and Bavarians.” Trying to “destroy the borders created by anti-Semites to isolate the Jews,” he provoked antisemites by contributing to anti-Semitism without borders and by stoking the fire of war against the Jews. Rathenau was awakening the volcano of Teutonic nationalism, whose hot lava was raining down on the Jews 11 years after he was infamously murdered by those who had already erected an altar for mass human sacrifice. The rise to power of the Nazis was not the birth of the devil, but the recognition of the legitimacy of his existence.
By his participation in the German government, Walter Rathenau showed that Jews rule Germany. There was no better incentive to inflame anti-Jewish passions than this circumstance. Walter Rathenau was not the first victim of violence in the Weimar Republic, but his death was the first time in German history that a Jew was murdered because he held a high office. The mass approval of the murder by society legalized the crime. As a victim of anti-Semites, however, he actually lit the fuse of a gunpowder cord already reaching for thousands, millions of future Jewish victims. Rathenau’s arrogant, unwavering confidence in the rightness of his policies and in the greatness of his German mission entailed other victims. His murder was the prelude to the Shoah of European Jewry.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and the Technion in Haifa (Doctor of Science, 1984). He immigrated to Israel in 1979. He is a Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. He is the author of eight books and about 500 articles in print and online, and has been published in 62 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, and German.