Political assassinations in the Weimar period

The TV series Babylon Berlin is a non insignifcant source of information about Weimar Berlin. At any rate, it inspires to look for more information. 

When Gereon Rath, in episode 5, season 2 of the series, visits the Austrian journalist Samuel Katelbach, who is investigating the German secret army, Katelbach warns the policeman :

« The people known as Black Reichswehr are not fussy. A thousand murders in five years. Murders of informants, journalists, people entrusted with confidential information. Only a handful of the killers were taken to court and all were acquitted. »

I’m not sure about the period Katelbach names, 1924-1929. I would think the amount of murders was highest during 1929-1922, but I might be proved wrong.

Many of the murders during the first years of the Weimar Republic were organized by the Organisation Consul, an ultra-nationalist secret force. It was formed by members of disbanded Freikorps (paramilitary organisations composed by former soldiers and officers). They were particularly active in Berlin. Its most conspicuous victims were Matthias Erzberger, a Catholic politician accused of having signed the peace treaty, with very harsh conditions for the defeated Germany, and therefore considered as a traitor, and Walter Rathenau, Foreign Minister and brilliant German statesman of jewish origins.

The Organisation Consul’s aim was war on « all anti-nationalists and internationalists; warfare against Jewry, Social Democracy and Leftist-radicalism; fomentation of internal unrest in order to attain the overthrow of the anti-nationalist Weimar constitution »

At least 354 people were murdered for political reasons, between 1919 and 1922.

And, as Katelbach says, the guilty of those crimes were rarely punished. The murderer of Matthias Erzberger, Heinrich Tillessen, was helped to escape to Hungary and then Spain. Rathenau’s murderer, Ernst Werner Techow, was sentenced to prison but amnestied in 1928.

So that, Katelbach was indeed right in warning detective Gereon Rath…