Matthias Erzberger (1875–1921) rose from a modest, Catholic background to become one of the most prominent and important politicians during the First World War and the early years of the Weimar Republic. That he did so without having a noble pedigree, background of military service, or a university degree made his rise all the more remarkable.

First elected as a member of the Catholic Center Party (Zentrum) to the Reichstag in 1903, under the old Imperial government, Erzberger harnessed his trademark capacity for hard work to master that legislative body’s procedural practices in minute detail. He initially supported Germany’s aggressive pursuit of military victory in the First World War, but his position had evolved by 1917 into one of advocating for an immediate, negotiated peace. Erzberger later led the four-person German delegation that signed the Armistice on November 11, 1918, a necessary and thankless task that made him a target of relentless right-wing attacks. Less than three years later, on August 26, 1921, a far-right hit squad assassinated Matthias Erzberger during one of his morning walks.

Upon appointment as Minister of Finance in late June 1919, Erzberger undertook a massive overhaul of Germany’s tax system in order to make it more equitable as well as more efficient. Fair tax policies, he believed, would foster greater social equality while still providing the necessary incentives for individual initiative and avoiding the economic turmoil that most Germans associated with communism. Erzberger advocated taxing income from capital investments at a higher rate than that from labor, since he viewed the latter as a far more productive contribution to the economy. He also wanted to narrow the wealth gap in Germany, which the war had only exacerbated, he regularly targeted war profiteers, in particular, in his speeches and his policy proposals.

Erzberger’s comments here on “The Danger of Bolshevism” come from a much longer speech that he gave to the National Assembly on July 8, 1919, in which he laid out his initial vision for systemic tax reform. Erzberger framed his proposed reforms as a way to inoculate hard-pressed average Germans against the siren call of Bolshevism by giving them the social equality that they demanded within a new and more fairly taxed capitalist order.

He opened this passage, however, with a blistering attack on the DNVP politician and former wartime Finance Minister, Karl Helfferich, whom Erzberger held responsible for having enabled the war profiteering and burgeoning inequities in the first place. Helfferich was also a leading propagator of the false claim that Germany’s defeat had stemmed from acts of domestic treason rather than from Allied military and economic superiority. Erzberger briefly alluded to this false claim—what later became known as the “stab-in-the-back myth”— in his criticism of Helfferich, which only hinted at the bitter animosity between the two men. Helfferich proceeded over the next several years to issue scathing broadsides against Erzberger and other supporters of the Republic, creating a poisoned political climate in which targeted assassinations, including that of Erzberger himself in 1921, became increasingly common.

After pointedly blaming Helfferich for the widespread feelings of economic resentment in Germany, Erzberger then warned in this passage that such resentment, if left unaddressed, would accentuate Bolshevism’s “destructive” appeal. To counteract that appeal, he proposed building a new order based on social justice, elements of which the Republic had already ushered in, unnoticed, in the form of increasing wages for workers and a decline in the value of capital investments. Erzberger concluded this passage by arguing that the people still wanted their fair share of the war profits and that well-designed financial reforms would meet these justified demands.