Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Who Was Walther Rathenau?

The European Jewish Press has an article about the Jewish youth who was attacked in France and is now in a coma. This is in addition to the murder of Halimi in 2006, the attack on the Grand Rabbi of the Nord Pas de Calais last year, and the French Jew abducted and tortured this past March.

In the margin of the European Jewish Press article there is a blurb:
1922: German Jewish minister killed
Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau assassinated by nationalists.
A quick check at Wikipedia gives the background.

Apparently assassins are heroes:
On 1922 June 24, two months after the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo, Rathenau was assassinated in a plot led by two right-wing army officers (aided and abetted by others) linked to Organisation Consul: Erwin Kern and Hermann Fischer.[4] On that morning, he was driving from his house to Wilhelmstraße, as he did daily (and predictably). During the trip his car was passed by another in which three armed men were sitting. They simultaneously shot at the minister with machine guns and then quickly drove away. A memorial stone in the Koenigsallee in Berlin-Grunewald marks the scene of the crime, which was officially (with flags legally at half mast) but not necessarily fervently mourned in Germany. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, they declared Rathenau's assassins as national heroes and designated June 24 as a holiday of celebration. One of the assassins was the future writer Ernst von Salomon——he had provided the car but was not present at the shooting. Curiously, he managed to stay out of the Nazi party and had a Jewish wife, whom he managed to protect throughout the Nazi years largely because of his credibility with the Nazis in having facilitated Rathenau's assassination. His anti-American book after the war, Der Fragebogen ("The Questionaire"), about the history of Germany between 1918 to 1946, was one of the bestsellers in West Germany while simultaneously being banned in U.K. schools for being anti-British.
Apparently, in England being an assassin was not enough of a reason to ban von Salomon's book.

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