HILFERDING, RUDOLF

born Aug. 10, 1877, Vienna died February 1941, Paris Austrian-born German politician who was a leading representative of the Viennese development of Marxism and who served as finance minister in 1923 and 1928 in two German Social Democratic governments. Hilferding turned to Socialism while he was a medical student and associated with Otto Bauer, Karl Kautsky, and August Bebel. In 1906 he became an instructor in the German Social Democratic Party's training school in Berlin. The first volume of the Marx Studien series (1904-22), Bhm-Bawerks Marx-Kritik (Bhm-Bawerk's Criticism of Marx, 1966), was his original contribution to Marxist thought. In Das Finanzkapital (1910) he maintained that the banks' increasing influence over industry led to monopoly and cartels and through them to economic imperialism and war; this work foreshadowed his role as the party's chief theorist and financial expert. He was political editor (1907-15) of Vorwrts, the main publication of the German Social Democrats. At the outbreak of World War I he opposed war credits. Conscripted into the Austrian Army, he served as a doctor on the Italian front. He acquired German citizenship c. 1920 and became chief editor of Die Freiheit, organ of the Independent Social Democrats. He was a Reichstag deputy from 1924 until he fled from Hitler's Germany in 1933. He drafted the Prague Program (January 1934) for exiled German Socialists. According to a dispatch from Berlin, he was found hanged in a Paris prison cell after his arrest by the French, who turned him over to the Nazis.