Eisner assassination

In mid-February 1919, Kurt Eisner, State Premier and Bavarian Independent Social Democratic Party (USPC) chair, failed politically. In addition to the ongoing criticism from political opponents on the right and the left, his coalition partner, the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (MSPD), no longer supported him. On February 21, 1919, he was on the way to the Bavarian Parliament to announce his resignation, when the student and officer Anton Graf Arco auf Valley shot him in the back. He justified his deed with these words: “Eisner [...] is a Bolshevist, a Jew; he's not a German” (Hitzer, p. 391).

To the radical left, the attack appeared to be an attack on the entire revolution; it believed that Eisner’s Social Democratic opponent Erhard Auer was partially responsible for the murder. The communist worker Alois Lindner perpetrated an attack on Auer in the state parliament the same day, shooting two officers in the process. Eisner's murder marked the beginning of a further phase of radicalization in Munich's political life, which ended with the proclamation of the Munich Soviet Republic on April 7, 1919.

Count Arco himself was shot by one of Eisner's guards at the scene of the crime and severely wounded. The trial against him before the Munich People’s Court began in December 1919. The presiding judge, Georg Neithardt, sentenced him to death on January 16, 1920 but at the same time found appreciative words by saying that his deed, “did not spring from a base disposition, but from the most ardent love for his people and fatherland” (Hitzer, S. 313). The death sentence triggered a protest demonstration of national and National Socialist groups, including at the Munich university. The rumor circulated that they would stage a coup together with the Reichswehr if the sentence was not rescinded. The next day, the Bavarian Minister of Justice, Ernst Müller-Meiningen (DDP), commuted the death sentence to lifelong imprisonment. It was interrupted in 1924 by a decision of the Council of Ministers with a view to “subsequently allow a probationary period” (Hitzer, p. 315). He was pardoned in 1927 by Reich President Hindenburg.