Walther Rathenau, a politically moderate Jew, had been the German foreign minister, and he felt Germany should pay its war debts as stipulated by the Treaty of Versailles while simultaneously trying to renegotiate them. For these views, and for his Jewishness, he was despised by the right wing, who that day dispatched a carful of thugs with machine guns to murder him on his way to his offices in the Wilhelmstrasse, near Bonhoeffer’s school.
