Commissioned to memorialize the hundredth anniversary of Walther Rathenau's assassination on June 24, 1922, Martin Sabrow's book is a revised version of the dissertation and short book he published in the mid-1990s. Here Sabrow takes advantage not only of the secondary literature that has appeared since then but also of new archival sources in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History in Moscow. Sabrow's central thesis is that the assassination of Rathenau, a prominent German Jew who had been serving as foreign minister since the previous October, had less to do with the wave of antisemitism that swept Germany since the last years of World War I than with the conspiratorial ambitions of a small group of right-wing activists whom Hermann Ehrhardt had assembled under the aegis of a secret organization known as the Organization Consul (Organisation Consul, O.C.).

Rathenau was not the only prominent German to be targeted for assassination by the handful of terrorists who had been recruited by the Organization Consul. In late August 1921, two assassins had murdered Matthias Erzberger, a former Reich minister of finance who was reviled by the Right for having signed the armistice in November 1918. This was followed in June 1922 by an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Philipp Scheidemann, a prominent Social Democrat who had earned the wrath of the radical Right by virtue of his strong support for Germany's new republican system. And Rathenau's assassination would be followed by an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the prominent Jewish publicist Maximilian Harden, who had attracted the enmity of the Right by switching his loyalties from the monarchy to the republic as editor of the highly regarded journal Die Zukunft.

What Sabrow does is to trace all of these atrocities back to the counterrevolutionary aspirations of Ehrhardt and those who had been recruited into his service. Ehrhardt had served with distinction as a naval officer during World War I and did his best to suppress the mutiny that erupted within the German navy with the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy in early November 1918. Unequivocally opposed to the system of government that emerged from the Weimar National Assembly in the spring of 1919, Ehrhardt began to organize his followers into a secret organization – the Organization Consul – that sought the republic's violent overthrow and the establishment of a more authoritarian form of government. Here, Sabrow makes an important observation with respect to the social pedigree of those whom Ehrhardt attracted to his crusade, namely that the overwhelming majority came from privileged backgrounds but had spent the formative years of their lives at the front and thus lacked the education, skills, and experience to find their way in the civilian world left in the wake of the war and revolution. They were, in other words, profoundly alienated from the world in which they found themselves and saw in Ehrhardt an opportunity to find meaning and purpose in their otherwise impoverished lives. Nowhere is this observation more astute than in the case of the two men who murdered Rathenau, Hermann Fischer and Erwin Kern.

The immediate assumption was that Rathenau had been targeted for assassination because of his Jewish identity. This, in turn, afforded the German judicial system a convenient explanation for Rathenau's assassination that effectively blinded it to the larger conspiracy of which the murders of Erzberger and Rathenau, as well as the unsuccessful efforts to kill Scheidemann and Harden, were all a part. What was really at stake – and here Sabrow is particularly critical of the German judiciary for its eagerness to accept antisemitism as the cause of Rathenau's murder – was its refusal to see that Rathenau's assassination was part of a much larger plot to overthrow Germany's new republican order by provoking an insurrection by the German working class which, in turn, would require its forceful suppression by Ehrhardt and the reserve army he had assembled under the auspices of the Organization Consul. And this would end not with the restoration of republican government or even the reestablishment of the monarchy but with the creation of a right-wing dictatorship to which all aspects of German public life would be subordinated.

This strategy failed not so much because the forces under Ehrhardt were poorly organized or lacked an effective chain of command but because it was based upon a fundamental miscalculation as to how German workers would react to Rathenau's assassination. For while there were massive demonstrations in Berlin and other metropolitan centers that gave vent to the anger those who supported Germany's republican system of government felt over the assault upon its leadership, this did not lead to the widespread violence that Ehrhardt and his supporters had hoped to use to justify their own embrace of violence. In fact, the opposite was true, as the German Center Party and the German Democratic Party closed ranks with the Social Democrats to create the Coalition of the Constitutional Middle (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der verfassungstreuen Mitte) and demonstrate their unconditional support for the existing system of government. Weimar democracy had not been fatally wounded by Ehrhardt's treachery but emerged from the crisis – at least in the short run – stronger than it had been before. In the meantime, the Organization Consul retreated from the limelight as its followers regrouped into new organizations such as the New German League (Neudeutscher Bund) and the Viking League (Bund Viking). Ehrhardt, in turn, became an increasingly marginalized figure on the German Right, remaining profoundly estranged from the man who would soon emerge as the unchallenged leader of the radical Right, Adolf Hitler.

Martin Sabrow's book is a fascinating study, rich in detail and endowed with a sense of nuance that enables the author to explore the circumstances and consequences of Rathenau's assassination with great subtlety. It is particularly valuable for its analysis of antisemitism and its role in the radical Right at a time when National Socialism had not yet established itself as the German Right's most powerful expression. At the same time, Sabrow's critique of the German judicial establishment and the way it allowed antisemitism to obscure the larger conspiracy behind Rathenau's murder represents a stinging indictment of the conservative biases that informed the administration of justice in Weimar Germany. Sabrow's work on the Rathenau assassination remains an important contribution to our understanding of the frailty of Weimar democracy and the strength of the forces pitted against its survival.