Archbishop Felix von Hartmann of Cologne, and the Bavarian agricultural interests as represented by the Bavarian Catholic People's Party in the State Diet at Munich and in the Reichstag in Berlin. Erzberger also was the leader of the left-wing of the Zentrum with Joseph Wirth. At a Reich party committee meeting, he said that "Left is life, Right is death." Erzberger continued to be pursued by the relentless animosity of the reactionary parties, the conservatives and the national liberals of the German People's Party. This hostility, which amounted to a vendetta, was based not so much upon Erzberger's foreign policy — his negotiation of the Armistice terms and the decisive influence which he exercised in securing the acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles — as upon his financial policies. He was suspect for his activities as finance minister in 1919, as the supporter of liberal Catholic trade unions and, it was said, as political adviser of the Catholic Chancellor of the Reich, Joseph Wirth, who prepared a fresh scheme of taxation designed to impose new burdens upon capital and upon the prosperous landed interests in the summer of 1921. Assassination The denunciations of the conservative and national liberal press went beyond the ordinary limits of party polemics. The Tägliche Rundschau observed, in allusion to Erzberger's appearance, "he may be as round as a bullet, but he is not bullet-proof". These attacks climaxed in Erzberger's murder on 26 August 1921 in Bad Griesbach, a spa in the Black Forest (Baden), while he was out for a walk. Because Erzberger signed the armistice of 1918, many on the political right regarded him as a traitor. Manfred von Killinger, a leading member of the Germanenorden, masterminded his killing by recruiting two members of the ultra-nationalist death squad Organisation Consul, Heinrich Tillessen and Heinrich Schulz. The assassins were former Imperial German Navy officers and members of the disbanded Marinebrigade Ehrhardt. Erzberger's assassins were later smuggled into Hungary and were prosecuted only after World War II. His funeral turned into a political rally, at which one of the speakers was Joseph Wirth. Erzberger is buried in the Catholic cemetery of Biberach an der Riss. Legacy Erzberger was instrumental in preparing the German nation for peace and in ensuring that the Catholic Centre Party, the predecessor of today's Christian Democratic Union, retained a modicum of power in an increasingly radicalized Germany. His financial, federal, and rail