Moritz Rath (1917-) was a German Sturmabteilung (SA) member and the son of Anno Rath and Helga Rath.
Biography[]
Rath in 1929
Moritz Rath was born in Cologne, German Empire in 1917, the son of Anno Rath and his wife Helga. As his mother had been engaged in an affair with Anno's younger brother Gereon for years before her marriage to Anno, it is possible that Moritz was Gereon's illegitimate son. Moritz was born just a year before his father went missing during World War I, and his mother raised him with financial support from Nyssen AG. In 1929, his mother brought him to Berlin with her after his father was officially declared killed in action, and Moritz - while excited to see his uncle Gereon again - grew cold towards him after realizing that his mother intended to formalize her relationship with Gereon, even though Moritz believed that his father was still alive. Moritz's curious nature led him to discover a hiding place in his host Bruno Wolter's basement where countless Berlin Police weapons crates were stashed for Operation Prangertag, leading to Wolter showing the young Moritz how to shoot a gun. Moritz also found the body of detective Stephan Jänicke in the former LUX works near Wolter's home after pranking a couple having intercourse by spilling cockroaches onto them.
Perhaps influenced by his brief stay with Wolter before his family moved into another apartment, Moritz cultivated nationalist views from a young age. He became involved with right-wing youth groups, and an old acquaintance recruited him into the Hitler Youth. Rath learned to shoot and fight from Horst Kessler while attending a Hitler Youth camp, but he was uninterested in reading Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf and was friendly towards the Jewish writer Samuel Katelbach, an enemy of the Nazis. By 1931, Rath joined the Sturmabteilung (SA) paramilitary of the NSDAP, and he fell in love with the young girl Toni Ritter, the sister of his uncle's colleague Charlotte Ritter. Moritz stabbed a police officer while rescuing Toni from a homeless shelter, but one of Moritz's colleagues blamed Toni for the murder. After learning that his father's membership of the SA was a police assignment, Moritz and Toni decided to hitchhike from Berlin and head west.