Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley

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Anton von Padua Alfred Emil Hubert Georg Graf von Arco auf Valley (5 February 1897 – 29 June 1945), commonly known as Anton Arco-Valley, German political activist, is best remembered as the assassin of the Bavarian socialist leader Kurt Eisner in February 1919.

Arco-Valley was born in Sankt Martin im Innkreis in Upper Austria, the son of Ferdinand Maria Emmerich Eduard, Count (Reichsgraf) von Arco auf Valley^[1] and Emily, Baroness (Freiin) von Oppenheim, the granddaughter of Salomon Oppenheim, a Jewish banker.^[2] After serving with a Bavarian regiment in the last year of World War I, he was demobilised and returned to study at Munich University, an angry and disillusioned German nationalist. As an aristocrat, a monarchist and a proclaimed anti-Semite despite his part-Jewish descent, he detested Eisner, the Jewish leader of the Bavarian socialists and Premier of Bavaria since the overthrow of the monarchy in November 1918. He wrote in his diary that Eisner deserved to die because he was a Jew.^[3] Arco-Valley may 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.^[4]^[5]

On 21 February 1919 Arco-Valley, acting alone, shot Eisner dead on a Munich street. His action triggered bloody reprisals by the Munich revolutionaries, in which a number of his fellow aristocrats were killed, including Prince Gustav-Franz of Thurn und Taxis. His actions inspired the young Joseph Goebbels, who was in Munich at the time.

Arco-Valley was tried in January 1920. He was sentenced to death, but a conservative judge eventually reduced this to five years in prison. The State Prosecutor said of him, "If the whole German youth were imbued with such a glowing enthusiasm we could face the future with confidence."^[6] He served his sentence at Stadelheim prison in cell 70, and in 1924 he was evicted from his cell to make way for Adolf Hitler. He was released in 1925, and was on probation until 1927, when he was pardoned.

Arco-Valley played no further part in politics, although he was decorated by the Nazi regime as a "hero of the movement." On July 10, 1934, he married his distant cousin Maria Gabrielle Countess (Gräfin) von Arco-Zinneberg. In June, 1945 he was killed in a traffic accident in Salzburg. Arco-Valley was survived by his wife, who died in 1987, his mother, and three daughters, of whom two are still living. He was a contemporary of another distant cousin of rather different political views, the physicist/inventor Count Georg von Arco (1869-1940). His elder brother Count Ferdinand (1893-1968) married Gertrud Wallenberg (1895-1983), member of the Swedish banking dynasty, and cousin of anti-Nazi agent Raoul Wallenberg.