Walther Rathenau

Origins and early life

Walther Rathenau was born in Berlin on 29 September 1867, the son of Emil Rathenau, the founder of the electrical company AEG, and of Mathilde Nachmann, both Jewish, and he never converted; he remained identified as a Jew all his life and wrote about the position of German Jews with a bitterness that his own murder made prophetic.

Work and career

Trained as a physicist and engineer, he built AEG's power stations, joined its board and became its chairman in 1915. At the outbreak of the First World War he conceived and directed the War Raw Materials Department, which organised the supply of every strategic material to the German war economy and which historians regard as one of the first modern systems of state economic planning. After the defeat he served the Weimar Republic, arguing that Germany must fulfil the reparations treaty in order to prove its terms impossible, and he became minister of reconstruction in 1921 and foreign minister in January 1922.

In April 1922 he signed the Treaty of Rapallo with Soviet Russia, breaking Germany's diplomatic isolation. The nationalist right had already made him its chief target as a Jew and a republican, chanting a street song calling for him to be shot down, and on 24 June 1922 members of the far-right Organisation Consul, who called him one of the Elders of Zion, machine-gunned his open car in Berlin and killed him. A million people attended the mourning demonstrations, and his murder is now read as an early sign of what the republic would face.