and nose. Later, after Scheidemann received repeated death threats and his house was smeared with swastikas, he always carried a pistol on walks to defend himself against attackers. The assassination attempt against him was part of a series of political murders that included among others Matthias Erzberger, one of the signers of the Treaty of Versailles, and Walther Rathenau. The perpetrators were members of the Organisation Consul (the group mainly responsible for the murder series), the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund (German Nationalist Federation for Protection and Defense), the Freikorps Ehrhardt Brigade and the Iron Division. The men who attacked Scheidemann were caught the same year and sentenced to long prison terms. Life in exile After the National Socialists seized power on 30 January 1933, Scheidemann, whom the far right had for years denounced as a leading November criminal, was in grave danger. A few days after the Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933, he fled to Salzburg, Austria, where Austrian National Council member Josef Witternigg took him in. Scheidemann's extensive records of his political activity, including 26 volumes of diary notes from 1914 to 1919, remained behind in Germany, where they were confiscated by the political police. They are now considered to have been lost. After stays in Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, France and the United States, Scheidemann arrived in Denmark in 1935. The German Reich's first expatriation list, published on 25 August 1933, deprived him of his German citizenship. Although his health was deteriorating, he observed the developments in Germany closely and published articles in the Danish working-class press under a pseudonym. Philipp Scheidemann died in Copenhagen on 29 November 1939. In 1953 the city of Copenhagen had his ashes transferred to Kassel. His grave is located in the old section of Kassel's main cemetery and is preserved as a grave of honor by the city. Scheidemann's own wish had been to be buried in Berlin alongside his wife Johanna, who died in August 1926. Writings in exile In the last years of his life, Scheidemann produced a number of manuscripts in which he attempted to critically examine various aspects of Social Democratic politics between 1918 and 1933. In 1940, after the German occupation of Denmark, Scheidemann's daughter Louise buried the papers near Copenhagen. She was able to recover them in 1945 and in 1947 gave the SPD executive committee some copies for inspection. In February 1948 the deputy party chairman