Anton Graf von Arco-Valley

Anton von Padua Alfred Emil Hubert Georg Graf von Arco auf Valley (5 February 1897 – 29 June 1945), commonly known as Anton Arco-Valley, was a German nobleman. He murdered Bavarian prime minister Kurt Eisner, the first republican premier of Bavaria, on 21 February 1919.

Anton Arco-Valley was born in Sankt Martin im Innkreis in Upper Austria. His father Maximilian was a businessman and estate owner, whose elder sister had married John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton. Anton's mother, Emily Freiin von Oppenheim, was from a wealthy Jewish banking family. The ancestral home of the old noble family of Arco was the Arco Castle north of Lake Garda in Trentino.

After serving with a Bavarian regiment in the last year of World War I, Anton returned from the front an angry and disillusioned German nationalist. He was an Austrian citizen by birth who later had adopted Germany as his home and he enrolled at Munich University. As a German nationalist and an aristocrat, a monarchist and a proclaimed anti-Semite despite his mother's Jewish descent, Anton detested Eisner, the Jewish leader of the Bavarian socialists and Premier of Bavaria.

Eisner is a Bolshevist, a Jew; he isn't German, he doesn't feel German, he subverts all patriotic thoughts and feelings. He is a traitor to this land.

Arco-Valley might have decided to kill Eisner to prove himself "worthy" after he had been rejected for membership of an ultra-nationalist group, the Thule Society, because he was partly of Jewish descent. On 21 February 1919, on a Munich street, von Arco-Valley, acting alone, gunned down Eisner. The killing of Eisner made him a champion to many Bavarians. Students at the University publicly proclaimed him a hero. His action triggered bloody reprisals by communists and anarchists in Munich in which a number of people were killed, including Prince Gustav of Thurn and Taxis. Fighting broke out and the short-lived Bavarian Socialist Republic was established. Arco-Valley inspired the young Joseph Goebbels, who was in Munich at the time.

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