It was a cloudy and rainy summer's day when the former German Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger of the Catholic Center Party met with a party friend, Reichstag member Karl Diez, while on vacation in the Black Forest.
The two central politicians began a walk on the morning of August 26, 1921 near Bad Griesbach.
Diez noticed two young men who followed them and suddenly faced them.
Both drew revolvers and aimed them at Erzberger's forehead and chest.
Two shots rang out, and Erzberger sank to the ground, hit, and rolled down an embankment.
The assassins killed him with two headshots.
Diez was also shot and seriously injured, but survived.
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Politician Erzberger: Victim of right-wing terror
Photo: dpa
It wasn't the first political murder since World War I; KPD co-founders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had already been killed in January 1919 by militant members of the reactionary Guard Cavalry Rifle Division. However, the attack on Erzberger was the first political murder in Germany of a former minister. The perpetrators escaped: Heinrich Ernst Walter Schulz and Heinrich Tillessen, officers of the First World War.
Their fatal shots also meant an »attack on the republic«, according to the political scientist Benjamin Dürr in his new biography »Erzberger - the hated reconciler«.
The murderers took part in the right-wing extremist Kapp Putsch in Berlin in March 1920 as members of the notorious Erhardt Freikorps Brigade.
And both were members of the right-wing terrorist organization Consul (OC), which emerged from it.
Right-wing Putschists as assassins
The conspiratorial organization was legally covered by the Bavarian wood processing company in Munich.
The OC members were bound to strict secrecy.
The Feme threatened "traitors", murder by so-called comrades.
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Right-hand caricature on the "stab in the back": Serious hate campaign against Scheidemann (front) and Erzberger
Erzberger had become the hate figure of the far right because he had signed the Compiègne Armistice Treaty in France on November 11, 1918 at the request of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg.
The agreement ended the fighting on the Western Front and paved the way for peace.
The right-wing Ultras, however, saw the signature as a "stab in the back" of the supposedly "undefeated in the field" army.
The fact that Erzberger then took over responsibility for the Weimar Republic as Reich Finance Minister increased the hatred of right-wing extremists who despised democracy.
A middle-class man who sought political balance and served the Social Democratic Chancellor Gustav Bauer as a conservative was a stimulus for radicals.
Incitement against "November criminals" and "traitors"
Erzberger created modern tax law with rules that are still valid today, such as direct wage tax deduction.
He suspected early on that political enemies were trying to kill him - and his suspicion was confirmed: after a trial date, the unemployed former ensign Oltwig von Hirschfeld fired two shots at him in front of the Moabit courthouse in January 1920 and was then convinced that "Erzberger is a pest and must be eliminated".
Hirschfeld saw him as the main culprit for Germany's defeat in the war.
Since the November Revolution of 1918, right-wing extremists had reviled democratic politicians like Erzberger or Walter Rathenau as "November criminals" and justified terrorist attacks with their agitation.
The assassin was sentenced to only 18 months in prison for dangerous bodily harm instead of attempted murder - and was soon given four months' imprisonment for an alleged illness. Erzberger, who was still finance minister at the time, survived with a shoulder injury. "The bullet that is supposed to hit me has already been poured," he told his daughter after the first attack. He should be proved right.
Tillessen and Schulz received the order to murder a good one and a half years later from the head of the OC's military organization, Manfred von Killinger.
He had served in the Imperial Navy from 1904 and joined the Erhardt Brigade after the end of the war in 1918.
With the paramilitary organization Consul, Killinger vowed to fight the democratic constitution and replace the Weimar Republic with a nationalist military dictatorship, be it through terrorism and political assassinations.
Organization Consul: ready to use violence at any time
It was not the only attack from the ranks of the organization: on June 4, 1922, two members sprayed hydrocyanic acid in the face of the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann, who had proclaimed the republic from the balcony of the Reichstag on November 9, 1918 after the end of the war;
His death was prevented by strong winds and that he did not breathe in at that moment.
And only three weeks later, on June 24th, the OC assassin Erwin Kern, a young former naval officer, fired a submachine gun at Walther Rathenau.
The liberal foreign minister of the Weimar Republic, previously often insulted as a "traitor" and "fulfillment politician", died immediately.
Manfred von Killinger helped the Erzberger murderers to flee to Hungary.
The authoritarian regime of Admiral Miklos Horthy ruled there, who had come to power through terrorism against the left and who sheltered the perpetrators.
The Hungarian government refused the extradition of the perpetrators requested by Germany.
Tillessen traveled to Spain in 1925 with a forged German passport.
Schulz drove via Italy to what is now Namibia, then to what is now Equatorial Guinea, at that time a Spanish colony, and traveled on to Barcelona.
In the spring of 1933 he returned to Germany, like his accomplice Tillessen in December 1932, in anticipation of Hitler's takeover.
From murderer to Nazi judge and diplomat
Indeed, in March 1933 there was an amnesty "for offenses committed for the national rebirth".
From the perspective of the National Socialists, this also included the murder of a liberal-conservative politician of the "system time," as they contemptuously called the Weimar Republic.
The person who commissioned the murder could also count on the goodwill of the "Führer" - and on career opportunities in the Nazi power apparatus: In March 1933, Killinger was first appointed "Reich Commissioner for Police" in Saxony, after which he temporarily took over the management of the state government.
Then the felon became a member of the new People's Court.
During the Second World War, Killinger worked for the Foreign Office, including as an envoy in Romania.
There he contributed to the introduction of the yellow star to mark the persecuted Jews.
When the Red Army entered the capital Bucharest on September 2, 1944, Killinger committed suicide.
The justice system of the Weimar Republic, which was often short of breath during trials against right-wing terrorists, had already surrendered to Killinger in January 1922.
The jury in Offenburg acquitted the murderer as "not guilty";
a year later, the Reichsgericht did not receive the verdict either.
Exemption from prison despite murder
Right-wing extremist criminals were later able to rely on the leniency of the West German post-war justice system.
Tillessen, who rose to the rank of corvette captain under the Nazis, was arrested after the end of the war and initially acquitted by a court in Constance in 1946 because of the Nazis' impunity ordinance of '33 for crimes allegedly committed "in the struggle for the national uprising of the German people" was.
The scandalous verdict also met with enormous international response.
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Dürr, Benjamin
Erzberger: The hated reconciler
Published by Ch. Links Verlag
Number of pages: 312
Published by Ch. Links Verlag
Number of pages: 312
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As a result, the French occupying forces immediately arrested Tillessen again on the day he was released from prison and obtained another trial.
More than a quarter of a century after his shooting at Erzberger in February 1947, the Konstanz district court sentenced the assassin to 15 years imprisonment for murder and a crime against humanity.
But already from May 1952 he enjoyed exemption from custody, shortly thereafter received parole and in 1958 pardon after Erzberger's widow had agreed to a pardon.
Tillessen was able to live in freedom for decades and died in 1984 shortly before his 90th birthday.
Schulz's accomplice was most recently Obersturmbannführer of the Waffen SS in the Nazi regime.
He, too, was arrested by the Americans in 1945 and only convicted of manslaughter, not murder, before the Offenburg Regional Court in 1950.
Tillessen had testified in Schulz's favor and described himself as the main perpetrator, very differently than in the trial against himself. The sentence was twelve years imprisonment - but Schulz was released on parole in December and died in 1979.
Collaboration: Jochen Leffers