After studying law at Berlin, Kiel, and Geneva, Luther joined the local civil service in Berlin. From 1907 to 1913 he was stationed at Magdeburg. In 1913 he was elected secretary to the German Städtetag, which was a nationwide council of various city government representatives. In 1918 he was elected mayor (burgomaster) of Essen. There he gained a reputation as one of the best local administrative officials in the western part of Germany. Luther was appointed minister of food and agriculture under Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno in December 1922. Under Cuno’s successor, Gustav Stresemann (October 1923), Luther was named finance minister and successfully met the task of stabilizing the inflated national currency—with the help of Hjalmar Schacht, later Adolf Hitler’s minister of economics. He kept his finance ministry post in the Wilhelm Marx ministry that followed, and at this time he took part in negotiating a new war-reparations settlement for Germany—the Dawes Plan (1924).

After the elections of December 1924 Marx was unable to form a new cabinet, and so Luther was appointed chancellor of Germany in January 1925. As chancellor, Luther carried through significant taxation and trade measures, but his most important achievement came when he joined with his foreign minister, Stresemann, in securing Germany’s adhesion to the various treaties known as the Locarno Pact (December 1925). Resigning immediately after the Locarno signings, he was quickly recalled (January 1926) to form a short-lived minority cabinet that fell in May 1926.

Delegates from Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, and Italy assembling in Locarno, …

Stock footage courtesy The WPA Film Library

In 1930 he succeeded Schacht as president of the Reichsbank (Germany’s central bank), and in 1933–37 he was German ambassador to the United States. He resigned in the latter year and lived in retirement throughout World War II. In the postwar years he taught at the Munich Academy of Political Sciences and served as an informal adviser to the West German government.