by Michael Dean
Walther looked steadily at Hartmut Plaas. The pistol was still pointing at his chest.
‘Nothing is that important,’ Walther said with a sigh. ‘If you’re going to shoot me for God’s sake get on with it.’
Hartmut smiled. He spoke in a strange voice, deeper than usual: ‘We sit in the dark and shake the dice. To get any further you shut your eyes and hope blind. You never know what’s going on. It’s always been like that. Erhardt and von Salomon only let us see so far, never as far as the goal. You sacrifice yourself and never know for how long or even what for.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Rathenau said, meaning it. ‘Will you kiss me before you kill me?’
*
Rathenau left the Portofino villa, driving at top speed to where the Russians were based at the Hotel Imperiale, on the outskirts of Rapallo. By the time he got there, he feared Chicherin would have given up on the wait. But the Russian was there, calm and still as ever.
‘Lloyd George has been phoning for you,’ he said.
‘Do you mind if I phone him? Before we talk?’
‘No, of course not.’ Chicherin nodded at the phone.
Direct lines had been installed connecting all the villas where the delegation heads were staying and all the hotels where the delegations and officials were. Rathenau dialled the number he had been given for the Villa d’Albertis. Lloyd George picked up the receiver, himself.
‘Hello? What?’
‘Hello, David?
‘Walther? ‘sthatyou?’ The Prime Minister was drunk.
‘Yes, David. You…’
‘Where are you?’
‘In Rapallo. With Chicherin.’
‘Excellent! You know what you have to do.’
‘Yes, indeed. Thank you, David. ‘
‘Don’t thank me, old boy. Nothing to do with me. Don’t know anything about it.’
Rathenau laughed nervously. ‘David, you were trying to telephone me?’
‘Oh, that. Yes. Megan disappeared for a while with Horne. I thought you might know where they were. But she’s back now. I think she’s finally seen through him.’
‘That’s good news, David.’
‘Yes. Now get off the line and bring me some more good news.’
And with that, David Lloyd George, the most influential man in Europe, hung up and went to sleep.
*
At 6.30pm on 16 April, the foreign ministers of Germany and Russia signed the Treaty of Rapallo, or Rathenau’s Treaty of Rapallo, as it rapidly became known. The Russians had had a draft ready as early as Chicherin’s stay in Berlin.
The agreement consisted of six articles providing for the immediate establishment of diplomatic and consular relations, the mutual repudiation of claims for war costs and damages (so Article 116 of Versailles was now dead), Russia’s renunciation of any possible claims under the Treaty of Versailles and Germany’s waiver of claims for the nationalization of its citizens’ property in Russia.
In a secret exchange of notes, Russia agreed to grant Germany equal status with the Allies. Germany was back on the stage of international politics. Just four years after the end of the Great War, Germany had regained its status as a major power.
Lloyd George raged picturesquely but not very convincingly.
The closing plenary session of the Genoa Conference was a great contrast to the opening, for Germany. Rathenau, not Wirth, spoke to the assembled delegates. Speaking in English then French, he said that the continued invocation of the Treaty of Versailles was neither desirable nor practical. He staked Germany’s claim to be a bridge and an enabler between east and west.
He ended with a quotation from Petrarch. ‘Io vò gridando Pace, Pace, Pace! - Hurrah, let us cry out with one voice. Peace, Peace, Peace!’ He was applauded to the rafters in a standing ovation by the delegates.
Versailles was now dead, or dying. The Corriere della Serra reported that the only gainer from the Genoa Conference had been Germany.
Back home in Berlin the reaction was rather different. Wilhelm Henning from Helfferich’s party, the DNVP, wrote a piece in the Konservativen Monatsschrift entitled ‘The True Face of the Treaty of Rapallo’:
‘The international Jew Rathenau had hardly got his fingers round German honour than one can speak of it no more. German honour should not be a chess piece in the hands of international Jews. German honour has been sullied. But Herr Rathenau and those who stand behind him will be brought to justice by the German race (Volke)’.
There was even a new rhyming death-threat in the throats of the many marching
against Rathenau, all over Germany.
Auch der Rathenau, der Walther And Rathenau, that Walther
erreicht kein hohes Alter won’t reach old age.
Chapter Twenty-five
Bernhard Weiss, head of political protection, was still sending a police guard to watch over Rathenau, sometimes openly, sometimes covertly. Rathenau was still sending them away. His standard line to acquaintances and correspondents was that he did not want to ‘become a prisoner.’
This was strictly for public consumption. He regretted Bosie’s failure to pull the trigger in Portofino, when he had the chance, even though that course of events would have decapitated the Genoa triumph. For one thing, as Genoa spring turned to early Berlin summer, he had not seen Bosie again and had no idea where he was.
So one would have thought that yet another warning of a planned attempt on his life would have made little impression. But for some reason this one did:
The warning was given by Joseph Wirth as they sat facing each other in the parlour of Walther’s Grunewald villa. The servant, Josef Prozeller, had just served coffee and one pastry each. His thefts from Walther had become more and more brazen, as was his general behaviour. He was now openly listening to the conversation. Walther made no attempt to send him away.
‘A priest has travelled all the way from Bavaria to see me,’ Wirth said. ‘He gave me details of a plot to murder you. He had to get permission from the Papal Nuncio to do that. This information was given to him in confessional, you see but he…’ Wirth tailed off, his teeth chattering at the enormity of it all.
Walther winced, both at the sacrifice the priest had made and at how moved Wirth was by it. ‘I can give you the details,’ Wirth resumed,. ‘or I can give them to Weiss. They plan to kill you while you are in your car.’
The servant, Josef Prozeller, gave a snort. Wirth ignored him; Walther shot him a reassuring half-smile, as if telling him not to worry. Then he laid a hand across the small inlaid table, reaching Wirth’s shoulder.
‘Dear friend, it’s nothing.’ And then, with characteristic pathos: ‘If my dead body were to be a stone in the bridge leading to understanding with France, then my life would not have been lived in vain and my work as Foreign Minister would have been a success.’
This time Prozeller’s snort was louder.
Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Rathenau delivered a speech in the Reichstag on the results of the Genoa Conference. Immediately after that speech, he had Karl Helfferich as the sole dinner guest at the Grunewald villa. As ever, Walther was trying to placate his enemies with a meal and a monologue.
He thought his intimate dinner that June evening with his arch enemy, Helfferich, cooked and served by a sullen Josef Prozeller, was a success. As events a couple of days later were to make clear, it was not.
*
Erwin Kern stood in the middle of the room, wagging his finger. He tended to make speeches at moments of high emotion:
‘He may pursue what the chatterers call the Policy of Fulfilment. What does that matter to us, who battle for greater glories? We are not fighting to make the people happy. We are fighting to force them to their destiny. But when this man pushes a belief on the people, forces on them a way borne of surrender after the war, that I will not tolerate.’
‘We know our enemy,’ von Salomon said. ‘The question is, how do we destroy him in his innermost being?’
Von Salomon was deeply c
oncerned. Ever the consummate actor, though, he did not let it show. OC had already lost thirty men, arrested after their assassination of Matthias Erzberger, who had signed the Treaty of Versailles for Germany. They were crippled financially by police reprisals in the aftermath of the Scheidemann debacle. Von Salomon’s money-changing booth at the station had had to be closed down.
Worst of all, they had missed their best chance to kill Rathenau when Plaas let him go at Portofino, then disappeared.
Von Salomon had heard from A1, in Munich. He wanted OC Berlin to put the original plan into effect and kill Rathenau in his car. In view of the importance of the operation, he instructed von Salomon to do it himself, assisted by Kern.
But in von Salomon’s opinion, if they killed Rathenau in Germany the Scheidemann reaction would be as nothing. The screams of outrage would shake the country. It was doubtful that Consul, in its weakened state, would survive at all. The perpetrators certainly would not.
It was difficult for von Salomon to keep a straight face as they sat there discussing their escape to Sweden after the assassination. But of course he played along with A1’s command, acting as if he would do the deed while making careful plans for his own escape – before not after the assassination of Rathenau.
‘I wish to live,’ von Salomon thought to himself. ‘It’s as simple as that. Kern will die for the cause, of that I am sure and I admire him for it. But I am not Kern.’
Meanwhile, their new post-Scheidemann poverty had seen them renting a dump of a flat in miserable Schiffbauerdamm. From there they went for long walks and went to see the film Dr Mabuse together. They had not yet obtained a car or the necessary pistols. Fischer had just said ‘It is as if the fates are against us.’ Amen to that, von Salomon thought to himself.
Kern then bought two leather coats and leather caps, the latter being a sensible move, as they could be pulled down over the assassins’ faces. Then they had to send Fischer to Munich to get more money from Ehrhardt. And when they finally did manage to get hold of a car, which von Salomon borrowed from a sympathiser called Küchenmeister, it immediately sprang a leak from the oil pump.
Morale was low. Von Salomon dipped into funds to treat them all to a slap-up meal, to cheer everybody up. This was at the Ratskeller at Steglitz, a bourgeois suburb which was a good deal more attractive than their present OC base-dump.
Here, over copious swigs of beer, cognac and wine, talk turned of its own accord to the murder of Rathenau. Kern raised a doubt that shooting from one car to another with ordinary pistols would guarantee killing him. They needed automatic pistols. To be really certain they needed grenades.
Their arms-dumps had all been found and closed down. Fischer, ever resourceful, eventually managed to obtain all this hardware from an ex naval-cadet colleague and OC member called Islemann.
They did some shooting practice in the Grunewald. The Mauser pistols, originally army stock, had a strong kickback. Frankly, none of them were happy with them, but they made the best of it. Fischer was still looking for false number plates for the car, which still had an oil leak, because they could not find a trustworthy mechanic.
And that was the state of play, when, out of the blue, they got word to go ahead immediately – the very next morning. Von Salomon informed the others that A1 had summoned him to Munich, out of the blue. He was to leave immediately. With every appearance of sadness, he told Fischer that he, and not von Salomon himself, would have the honour, along with Kern, of killing the Jew who had sold Germany to the Bolsheviks at Rapallo.
Then he put his escape plan into action. However, without telling Kern or Fischer, he contacted Josef Prozeller before he left and gave him detailed instructions.
Chapter Twenty-six
On 23 June, 1922, Karl Helfferich spoke to a Reichstag jammed to the gunnels with deputies, Rathenau among them. The personal attack he launched came as a surprise to Rathenau. Perhaps this was because only two days earlier they had shared what Walther considered a cordial dinner together at the villa.
However, even by Helfferich’s standards, the attack was of unparalleled ferocity. His speech that day is widely considered to be among the bitterest, most scathing diatribes ever launched by one politician against another in any public forum, let alone a parliament. It was also a farrago of lies, from start to finish.
Helfferich stood, ferret-tense, poised to pounce. He was balding from the front, at this time. He thrust his right hand deep into his trouser pocket as far as the cuff, the light through the dusty windows of the Reichstag glinting off his just-exposed right cuff-link and his gold watch-chain.
He warmed up by, in effect, blaming Rathenau for the French occupation of the Saar:
‘As far as the Saar area is concerned, the minister has painted his own picture which withholds the true colours and what is really going on. Is it not true that by his behaviour he has created an atmosphere of mistrust among the people? No, more than that, an atmosphere of bitterness and outrage, hate and rage. Why don’t you admit that, Herr Minister?’
Rathenau was silent. Helfferich went on to accuse him of deliberately misleading parliament, illegally negotiating away German territory and – apparently – forgery. He was talking about the detail of disarmament negotiations between Germany and the allied powers, following Genoa and Rapallo:
‘You have done more than not kept Parliament and the Foreign Office accurately informed, you have deliberately misled them. What is the meaning of the difference between the German text and the French? What is being covered up here? A German minister who without permission of Parliament gives up significant amounts of German sovereignty belongs before the criminal courts.’
Indeed. Except that there was no difference between the German and French texts and no territory had been ceded.
Having got himself warmed up, Helfferich got down to business: In the section of his speech attacking the Policy of Fulfilment he insistently used the slogan ‘The Policy of Fulfilment is the policy of catastrophe’. It is crisper in German - Erfüllungspolitik – Katastrophenpolitik.
Then came the first public use of Rathenau’s homosexuality against him. ‘Our salvation will come when the German government shows some backbone in dealing with impossible demands. When we in Germany are once again led by men.’
In case anybody missed the point, Helfferich said the word ‘men’ in mocking falsetto and accompanied it with a mincing wrist gesture. Delegates from the far-right roared with laughter, whooped and cheered. Some added their own elements of mockery of homosexuals. It was some minutes before Helfferich could continue.
Here is the peroration. ‘What are the results of this path of suffering, this Fulfilment Policy? It has brought us the frightful devaluation of German currency, it has lamed our middle-classes, it has left countless people and families in need and misery, it has driven countless numbers to despair and even suicide; it has delivered vast amounts of our most valuable productive capacity to foreigners. It has shaken our economic and social order to the core. The man who has done this is a criminal!’ Here he pointed dramatically at Rathenau. ‘He belongs in the dock in a criminal court!’
Rathenau sat stock still, pale even for him, his hands shaking slightly. Around him the howls of the deputies broke over him like waves. ‘An- zeigen! An-zeigen!’ -‘Prosecute him! Prosecute him!’
And the inevitable undertow: Jude! Jude!
After Helfferich’s speech, Hugo Stinnes was crossing the vestibule of the Reichstag, having just left his bloc of Volkspartei deputies. His smile at Helfferich’s destruction of Rathenau was still playing under the thick foliage of his beard.
He ran into the Belgian representative on the reparations commission, Piet Bemmelman, who was visiting Berlin. Bemmelman told Stinnes that the whole relationship between the Allies and Germany was in crisis. France had not been told in time about the steep fall in coal production from the Ruhr, coming at the same time as another shortfall from Upper Silesia.
This was only the latest unravell
ing of every aspect of the Versailles reparations arrangements. Bemmelman then said: ‘Within four or five months the French will come round to the position the Americans, British and Belgians hold already, that there must be a fundamental renegotiation of the whole reparations question.’
Stinnes said: ‘Do you mean at The Hague?’ This was to be the next world conference after Genoa.
Bemmelman said: ‘Yes’
Bemmelman regarded this as a casual exchange at a chance encounter. But it was far more than that to Stinnes. Bemmelman had just told him that Versailles was not only dead, that is inoperative – as many had believed after Genoa – but was to be renegotiated. This would be a massive diplomatic triumph for Rathenau and the Policy of Fulfilment.
Clearly, this news was not yet official, had not yet even been shared with Rathenau’s Foreign Office, otherwise Rathenau would surely have given some intimation. There was no question, for Stinnes, of allowing Rathenau this triumph or allowing any alteration in the coal industry arrangements from whose chaos Stinnes and the other industrialists were profiting enormously.
Stinnes looked round for Helfferich then and there, but the hero of the hour was still in the chamber, being near-mobbed with congratulation for his virulent attack on Rathenau. So Stinnes went home. He considered phoning Ludendorff then and there, but felt he needed confirmation and more information.
It was not long coming. At 10.15 that evening, Rathenau telephoned him from the American Embassy. He was discussing coal delivery issues with the American ambassador, Allen Houghton, he said. The American representative on the Reparations Commission was also there.
Rathenau would welcome Stinnes’ presence at these promising coal-talks, he said. He had told Houghton that Stinnes knew more about the detail of the coal industry than he, Rathenau, did. Rathenau was embracing his enemies – nothing had changed since he arranged that meeting with Stinnes at the Automobile Club when he was a young man running the Bitterfeld plant. Stinnes came as fast as he could.
