About Matthias Erzberger
Matthias Erzberger (20 September 1875 – 26 August 1921) was a German Centre Party politician who, from 1919-1920, served as the Minister of Finance and, in 1919, Vice Chancellor of Germany. Erzberger was first elected to the Reichstag of the German Empire in 1903. During the early years of World War I he supported Germany's position enthusiastically but later became a leading opponent of unrestricted submarine warfare and proposed the successful 1917 Reichstag peace resolution, which called for a negotiated peace without annexations. In November 1918 he headed the German delegation to negotiate an end to the war with the Allies and was one of the signatories of the Armistice of 11 November 1918. He was elected to the Weimar National Assembly in 1919 and served as a minister without portfolio in Philipp Scheidemann's cabinet. When Scheidemann resigned as minister president in protest over the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Erzberger – who supported the treaty because he saw no alternative to it – became finance minister and vice-chancellor under Gustav Bauer. He pushed through the "Erzberger reforms" that transferred supreme taxing authority from the states to the central government and redistributed the tax burden more towards the wealthy. Under attack for corruption from a member of the right-wing German National People's Party, he was forced by the Centre Party to resign in March 1920 but was elected to the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic later in the year. Both his role in ending the war and his financial policies earned him the enmity of the political right. On 26 August 1921, he was assassinated by two members of the right-wing terrorist group Organisation Consul. Erzberger joined the Centre Party and was first elected to the German Reichstag in 1903 for Biberach.
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