Today -100: February 22, 1919: Another day, another assassination

Kurt Eisner, the radical Bavarian Chancellor, who was actually on his way to the state Diet to resign, is shot dead by Count Anton von Arco auf Valley, who hated Eisner on political as well as anti-Semitic grounds despite his own Jewish heritage on his mother’s side. Arco-Valley shouts “Down with the revolution, long live the kaiser!” He will be tried before a sympathetic right-wing judge by a sympathetic right-wing prosecutor who will praise his “enthusiasm.” He will serve 5 years (some of it in a cell that Hitler got right after him) (right now he’s in the same cell Eisner occupied a year ago).

While announcing Eisner’s death to the Diet, Interior Minister Erhard Auer, a rightist, is himself shot and wounded by someone in the public gallery. Spartacists seize Munich police hq, but government forces recapture it.

The Central Federated Union of New York votes to strike on July 1 if beer is cut off on that date. No beer, no work.

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