Walther Rathenau was No. 354

01Grunewald, a Saturday morning

Nine shots from a passing car

Walther Rathenau, an industrialist's son born in Berlin in 1867, had been foreign minister since 1 February 1922, 143 days. The far right hated him for his policy of meeting the Allies’ demands, and as a Jew. He had declined protection despite police warnings.

On the morning of 24 June he set off in his open car from his house, Koenigsallee 65, for the Foreign Office. In the curve at Erdener Straße another car overtook his. Nine shots were fired from close range, and a hand grenade went off in his car. The Bundestag gives the time as 11 o’clock.

Ernst Werner Techow drove the attackers’ car; Erwin Kern fired a machine pistol; Hermann Fischer was the third man. All three were members of the far-right Organisation Consul. Rathenau was carried back into his house, and died within minutes. He was 54.

02A statistician's list

Emil Gumbel counted every political murder

The statistician Emil Julius Gumbel collected every political killing in Germany since the revolution of 9 November 1918 whose victim he could name, from court files, verdicts, witness statements and newspapers. His book, Vier Jahre politischer Mord, expanded an earlier pamphlet. He dated its preface 16 October 1922.

He wrote that he had chosen the cases from the right “far more cautiously” than those from the left, and did not claim his list was complete. Below, every dot is one killing on his list, in the order of his table.

04Leipzig, October 1922

The court could not prove a plot

The case went to the Staatsgerichtshof zum Schutze der Republik, the special court the new law had created. It sat in the Reichsgericht building in Leipzig from 3 October to 14 October. More than a dozen people had been identified as involved.

On 14 October, 112 days after the murder, Ernst Werner Techow, the driver, was sentenced to 15 years in a penitentiary for aiding the murder. Ernst von Salomon, of the Consul, for aiding the murder, got 5 years.

The court could not prove that the Organisation Consul had planned the murder, and it never settled whether the killers had backers. Two days after the verdict, Gumbel dated the preface of his book, with the Rathenau sentences already in its last row.

05The house and the curve

A stone in the curve

In June 1923 the Reich government took over Rathenau's house as a museum, his study kept as it was on the day he died. After 1933 the Nazis closed the memorial in his house and renamed the streets that bore his name.

In October 1946 the Liberal-Demokratische Partei set a granite stone in the curve of the Koenigsallee. Its plaque reads: “Er fiel an dieser Stelle durch Mörderhand am 24. Juni 1922”, he fell at this spot by a murderer's hand. His grave at Oberschöneweide is an honorary grave of the city of Berlin.