The Rathenau Murder and the German Counter-Revolution

100 years after the murder of Walther Rathenau - The background of the right-wing terror against the first German Republic.

On June 24, 1922, Walther Rathenau, Reich Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic, was shot dead on the open street. No other event shook the Weimar Republic more than the series of attacks in 1921 / 1922, which were carried out against Rathenau and former Reich Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger, against the first German Prime Minister Philipp Scheidemann, and finally against the publicist Maximilian Harden.
Martin Sabrow explores the question: Were the assassinations attributable to incited individual perpetrators, or was there an organized murder plot of a secret society behind them? German justice was unable (or unwilling) to prove the guilt of the »Consul« organization, which was already suspected by contemporaries. And yet it had obviously pulled all the strings.
The author uncovers the events of that time. He proves the deliberate bending of the law by the conservative thinking judiciary and explains why the aim of the assassination series could never be fully known to the public: It was to become the secret prelude to the German Counter-Revolution.

Martin Sabrow, born 1954, director of the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History Potsdam and professor of Recent and Contemporary History at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Sabrow’s publications are focused on political and cultural history of the 20th Century. Recently he gained attention because of his research on Karl Liebknecht, published together with Dominik Juhnke and Judith Prokarsky, winning the ›Golo Mann Preis‹ for Historiography 2018.