Walther Rathenau organised Germany's wartime raw materials, then nationalists killed him
When the British blockade began choking Germany's supplies in 1914, the industrialist Walther Rathenau persuaded the War Ministry to create a department to manage scarce raw materials, and ran it himself. He later served as foreign minister. Just two months after he signed a landmark treaty with Soviet Russia, ultra-nationalists shot him dead in Berlin.
Rathenau was born in Berlin in 1867, the son of Emil Rathenau, a Jewish businessman who founded the electrical giant AEG. Walther earned a doctorate in physics in 1889, worked as an engineer at a Swiss aluminium plant and ran electrolysis experiments at a small chemical firm before joining AEG's board in 1899. He built power stations in Manchester, Buenos Aires and Baku, was involved with 84 companies worldwide, and became known as an expert at restructuring struggling firms.
Visiting Germany's African colonies in 1907 and 1908 alongside colonial secretary Bernhard Dernburg, he argued that African workers must be treated fairly. In German South West Africa he condemned the genocide of the Herero and Nama as the worst atrocity German military policy had ever produced, and said the colonised people lived in something resembling slavery.
From August 1914 his War Raw Materials Department set prices, directed supplies to vital industries and began developing substitute materials. He left in March 1915 and became head of AEG when his father died that June. After the war he joined the liberal German Democratic Party, pushed for workers to share in managing companies rather than for state ownership, and in 1921 became minister of reconstruction under Chancellor Joseph Wirth.
As foreign minister in 1922, he insisted Germany honour the Versailles treaty while pressing to revise it, and on 16 April signed the Treaty of Rapallo restoring relations with the Soviet Union. Extremists, including the young Nazi Party, branded him part of a Jewish-communist plot. Members of the secret Organisation Consul murdered him on 24 June, hoping to spark civil war. Instead, mass demonstrations briefly strengthened the Republic.
Source: Walther Rathenau
