The agreement, along with Rathenau's insistence that Germany fulfil its obligations under the Treaty of Versailles, led right-wing nationalist groups (including a nascent Nazi Party) to brand him part of a Jewish-communist conspiracy.

[4] Rathenau worked as a technical engineer in a Swiss aluminium factory and then as a manager in a small electro-chemical firm in Bitterfeld, where he conducted experiments in electrolysis.

He returned to Berlin and joined the AEG board in 1899,[3] becoming a leading industrialist in the late German Empire and early Weimar Republic.

Soon after returning from East Africa, Rathenau submitted a report to the German government which was influential in developing official policy towards the colony.

[9] Rathenau held a sense of inferiority in society due to his Jewishness, realising, in the words of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, "that he had come into the world as a second-class citizen and that no amount of ability and merit could ever free him from the condition".

The idea that the Jews were "our misfortune", as the German nationalist historian Heinrich Treitschke wrote, led to the proliferation from the 1880s of antisemitic parties.

In the midst of German life an isolated, strange human tribe, resplendently and conspicuously adorned, hot-blooded and animated in its behaviour.

... Assimilation in the sense that tribal qualities – regardless of whether they are good or bad – that are demonstrably hateful to fellow Germans are cast off and replaced by more suitable ones.

Passionate about social equality, he rejected state ownership of industry and instead advocated greater worker participation in the management of companies.

[16] His ideas were influential in postwar governments, although in 1919 when his name was mentioned in the Weimar National Assembly as a candidate for president of Germany, there was a burst of laughter among the other members.

[17] Referring to the extreme right-wing organizations that arose within months of the communist-inspired Spartacist uprising in January 1919, he said in the Reichstag that they were, "the product of a state in which for centuries no one has ruled who was not a member of, or a convert to, military feudalism".

His insistence that Germany should fulfil its obligations under the Treaty of Versailles but work for a revision of its terms infuriated extreme German nationalists.

[19] The leaders of the still obscure Nazi Party and other extremist groups claimed that he was part of a "Jewish-communist conspiracy", despite the fact that he was a liberal German nationalist who had bolstered the country's war effort.

[1] The British politician Robert Boothby wrote of him, "He was something that only a German Jew could simultaneously be: a prophet, a philosopher, a mystic, a writer, a statesman, an industrial magnate of the highest and greatest order, and the pioneer of what has become known as 'industrial rationalisation'.

He was being chauffeured from his house in Berlin-Grunewald to the Foreign Office in the Wilhelmstraße when his car was passed by another with Ernst Werner Techow behind the wheel and Erwin Kern and Hermann Fischer in the back seat.

Kern opened fire with a submachine gun at close range, killing Rathenau almost instantly, while Fischer threw a hand grenade into the car before Techow quickly drove them away.

Ehrhardt and his men believed that Rathenau's death would bring down the government and prompt the Left to act against the Weimar Republic, thereby provoking civil war in which the Organisation Consul would be called on for help by the Reichswehr.

[23] The historian Michael Kellogg argued that Vasily Biskupsky, Erich Ludendorff and his advisor Max Bauer, all members of the Aufbau Vereinigung, a group of tsarist exiles and early Nazis, colluded in the assassination of Rathenau, although the degree of their participation was not entirely clear.

After a daring flight, which kept Germany in suspense for more than two weeks, they were finally spotted at Saaleck Castle in Thuringia, whose owner was a secret member of the Organisation Consul.

Twelve more defendants were arraigned on various charges, among them Hans Gerd Techow and Ernst von Salomon, who had spied out Rathenau's habits and kept in contact with the Organisation Consul, as well as the commander of the Organisation Consul in Western Germany, Karl Tillessen, a brother of Matthias Erzberger's assassin Heinrich Tillessen, and his adjutant Hartmut Plaas.

The Nazis systematically wiped out public commemoration of Rathenau by destroying monuments to him, closing the Walther-Rathenau-Museum in his former mansion and renaming streets and schools dedicated to him.

Instead, a memorial plate to Kern and Fischer was solemnly unveiled at Saaleck Castle in July 1933, and in October 1933, a monument was erected on the assassins' grave.

Rathenau is generally acknowledged to be, in part, the basis for the German noble and industrialist Paul Arnheim, a character in Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities.

In Kaiserreich, a popular alternative history scenario for the game Hearts of Iron IV, he is credited for predicting the 1936 Berlin Stock Market Crash, known as "Black Monday" and depending on player's choice, can become the leading figure of the German's Empire's recovery from the crisis, through the adaptation of his plan to restructure the German Economy.