Matthias Erzberger (20 September 1875 – 26 August 1921) was a German Centre Party politician who served as the minister of finance of Germany from 1919 to 1920.
Erzberger was first elected to the Reichstag of the German Empire in 1903. During the early years of World War I he supported Germany's position enthusiastically but later became a leading opponent of unrestricted submarine warfare and proposed the successful 1917 Reichstag peace resolution, which called for a negotiated peace without annexations. In November 1918 he headed the German delegation to negotiate an end to the war with the Allies and was one of the signatories of the Armistice of 11 November 1918.
He was elected to the Weimar National Assembly in 1919 and served as a minister without portfolio in Philipp Scheidemann's cabinet. When Scheidemann resigned as minister president in protest over the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Erzberger – who supported the treaty because he saw no alternative to it – became finance minister and vice-chancellor under Gustav Bauer. He pushed through the "Erzberger reforms" that transferred supreme taxing authority from the states to the central government and redistributed the tax burden more towards the wealthy. Under attack for corruption from a member of the right-wing German National People's Party, he was forced by the Centre Party to resign in March 1920 but was elected to the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic later in the year.
Both his role in ending the war and his financial policies earned him the enmity of the political right. On 26 August 1921, he was assassinated by two members of the right-wing terrorist group Organisation Consul.
Early career
He was born on 20 September 1875 in Buttenhausen (today part of Münsingen) in the Kingdom of Württemberg, the son of Josef Erzberger (1847–1907), a tailor and postman, and his wife Katherina (née Flad; 1845–1916). In his early life he gained massive weight, which he lost in the course of thirty years. He attended the seminaries in Schwäbisch Hall and Bad Saulgau, where he graduated in 1894, and started a career as a primary school (Volksschule) teacher.
Imperial Reichstag
Erzberger joined the Centre Party and was first elected to the German Reichstag in 1903 for Biberach. By virtue of unusually varied political activities, he took a leading position in the parliamentary party. He became a specialist in colonial policy
In 1900, he married Paula Eberhard, daughter of a businessman, in Rottenburg am Neckar. They had three children (a son and two daughters). By this stage he was secretary to the Reichstag's Military Affairs Committee, and the "right-hand man" of the Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. He was in charge of foreign propaganda, especially relating to Catholic groups, and set up a system of information gathering using the resources of the Holy See and of the Freemasons.
On 25, 27, and 28 November, Erzberger spoke on modernizing the administration. He won widespread socialist support for attempting through the Bundesrat to protect the civil rights of citizens. In December 1916 he successfully used the Budget Committee of the Reichstag to navigate the Auxiliary Services Act into law. It required all men not in the military or working in certain areas of the economy to be employed in a job vital to the war effort and, in return, recognized trade unions as equal negotiating partners with employers.
Apart from Karl Liebknecht (a member of the Reichstag for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) until 1916), Erzberger was the only German politician who is known to have tried to stop the Armenian genocide, the persecution of the Greeks, and the Assyrian genocide in the Ottoman Empire. He travelled to Constantinople in February 1916 for negotiations with the Young Turks rulers allied with Germany, met Enver Pasha and Talaat Pasha on 10 February 1916, and at their request prepared a memorandum on the measures to be taken in favour of Christians in Turkey. It explicitly referred only to Catholic Armenians and was never answered or considered by the Ottoman government. The general failure of his mission in Turkey filled Erzberger with indignation and disappointment.
In 1916, Erzberger made a proposition that the sovereignty of the Holy See be restored by the House of Liechtenstein transferring the sovereignty of Liechtenstein to the Pope. The plan was supported by Pope Benedict XV, but was ultimately rejected by Franz, who acted on behalf of Johann II, Prince of Liechtenstein. The plan was unknown to the public until Erzberger published his book in 1920, which it was then received negatively. He expounded his views on the war in a speech in the Reichstag on 6 July in which he called on the government to renounce territorial ambitions and conclude a negotiated end to the war. The speech was remarkable at the time in the way he carefully delineated the extent of German military weakness. That same day, leading deputies from the Majority Social Democrats (MSPD), the Centre, and the liberal Progressive People's Party agreed to form an Inter-Party Committee as a coordinating body, which was seen as the prelude to the parliamentarization of Germany and accordingly interpreted by conservatives as the "beginning of the revolution". The Committee, with the help of Ebert's oratory, galvanized moderate opponents of the 'war party' and served to pacify the working class.
On 9/10 July Bethmann Hollweg obtained a promise from the Crown Council and Emperor Wilhelm II that equal manhood suffrage would be introduced in Prussia after the war to replace the Prussian three-class franchise which apportioned votes based on taxes paid. The promise became known to the public on 12 July.
Erzberger's actions during the first half of July helped to bring about the fall of Bethmann Hollweg.
That same July, at a closed conference in Frankfurt, Erzberger revealed the content of a pessimistic secret report from Austria-Hungary's Foreign Minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, to Austrian Emperor Karl I regarding the state of the war effort. The report also came into the possession of the Allies. Although it has never been proven that Erzberger was responsible, it led to the extreme right seeing him as a traitor to his country. Prince Max supposed that Erzberger, as a Catholic civilian, would be more acceptable to the allies than a Prussian military officer; in addition, he believed that Erzberger's reputation as a man of peace was unassailable.
Against hopes that Erzberger would be able to obtain better conditions from the Allies, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the chief Allied negotiator, was unwilling to make any concessions, with the exception of a slight extension of the time allotted to the German army to withdraw. Erzberger was unsure whether he should hold out for further changes in Germany's favour. On 10 November, Paul von Hindenburg himself telegraphed back that the armistice should be signed, with or without modifications, and a while later the new Chancellor, the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, telegraphed Erzberger to authorize him to sign.
After the war
Returning to Berlin, Erzberger agreed to remain Chairman of the Armistice Commission, a difficult and humiliating task. He fell out with Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, first Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic, in early 1919 for advocating the handing over of Karl Radek, the Bolshevik diplomat and agitator, to the Entente following the failure of the Spartacus Uprising.
After the elections for the Weimar National Assembly in January 1919, Erzberger entered the government of the German Republic led by Philipp Scheidemann, again as minister without a specified portfolio, but responsible for matters relating to the armistice. Second, Erzberger aimed for a significant redistribution of the tax burden, lightening the burden on low- to moderate income households. In July 1919, war levies on income and wealth were introduced, as well as the first German inheritance tax.
The German tax code still bears Erzberger's imprint. He stabilized national finances, although they remained strained by the burden of war reparations. fired two shots at Erzberger, the first of which "inflicted a shoulder wound, while the second was deflected by the minister's watch chain."
Erzberger continued to be pursued by the relentless animosity of the reactionary parties, the conservatives and the national liberals of the German People's Party. This hostility, which amounted to a vendetta, was based not so much upon Erzberger's foreign policy – his negotiation of the Armistice terms and the decisive influence which he exercised in securing the acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles – as upon his financial policies. He was suspect for his activities as finance minister in 1919, as the supporter of liberal Catholic trade unions and, it was said, as political adviser of the Catholic Chancellor of the Reich, Joseph Wirth, who prepared a fresh scheme of taxation designed to impose new burdens upon capital and upon the prosperous landed interests in the summer of 1921. Because Erzberger signed the armistice of 1918, many on the political right regarded him as a traitor. Manfred von Killinger, a leading member of the Germanenorden, masterminded his killing by recruiting two members – Heinrich Tillessen and Heinrich Schulz – of the ultra-nationalist death squad Organisation Consul. The assassins were former Imperial German Navy officers and members of the disbanded Marinebrigade Ehrhardt. Erzberger's assassins were later smuggled into Hungary and were prosecuted only after World War II.