Bruno Schröder (banker)

This article explains the private banker and art collector; for the archaeologist see Bruno Schröder (archaeologist) .

Baron Bruno Schröder, portrait by Phillip de Laszlo (1908)

Rudolph Bruno Schröder (from 1907: Freiherr von Schröder , in Great Britain generally Baron Bruno Schröder , born March 14, 1867 in Hamburg , † December 10, 1940 in Dell Park, Englefield Green, Surrey ) was a German-British private banker , art collector and patron .

Live and act

Rudolph Bruno Schröder was the eighth of nine children of the merchant and banker Johann Rudolph Schröder (1821–1887) and his wife Clara Louise, nee. Schröder (1829–1910), a daughter of Johann Heinrich Schröder .

After serving in the military in the 2nd Grand Ducal Mecklenburg Dragoon Regiment No. 18 , at the age of 21 he joined the trading and banking house Schröder Gebrüder & Co. founded by his father and uncle . He traveled to London for an internship at the local family company J. Henry Schröder & Co. and in 1891/92 to the USA and Central America to get to know the company's overseas trading partners.

After his return to Hamburg, he received an invitation from his childless uncle, John Henry Schröder , to come to London entirely with the prospect of later becoming his successor as a senior partner. Bruno accepted the invitation, joined the company in 1893, became a partner in 1895 and in 1910, when John Henry retired from the business and died a little later, he became the senior partner of J. Henry Schröder & Co.

Together with partner Frank Tiarks , he continued the successful banking business with a focus on trade finance and bond business. In 1908 J. Henry Schröder played a decisive role in bringing about the coffee valorisation , and in 1913 it was the second largest bank in terms of credit volume in the City of London , which was mainly due to the financing of German overseas trade. Even if this branch of business collapsed in the First World War , Bruno Schröder, who had obtained British citizenship at the beginning of the war in an urgent procedure, also benefited considerably from war-related trade and financial transactions, for example in the Cuban sugar trade.

In the 1920s he was one of the sought-after advisors to German and Austrian financial institutions and the German government. In 1923, a syndicate he ran took over shares in the Baghdad Railway from Deutsche Bank .

In the same year Schröder and Tiarks founded an offshoot in New York under the company J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation , commonly known as Schrobanco , which successfully specialized in raising American capital for the economy in Germany and Central Europe.

The banking crisis of 1931 was a difficult time for the company, from which it only recovered in the 1950s.

family

Bruno Schröder's daughters Marga and Dorothee, portrait by Philip de Laszlo

In April 1894 Bruno Schröder married the Cologne banker's daughter Emma Deichmann, a granddaughter of Wilhelm Ludwig Deichmann . The couple had two daughters, Dorothee (1897–1985), and Marga (1898–1977). The eldest son was in Germany when the war broke out in 1914, was drafted there and has been missing on the Russian front since 1915. In 1926 the couple's second son, Helmut Freiherr von Schröder (1901–1969), joined the company and in 1940 succeeded his father as senior partner.

Patrons and collectors

Like his uncle, Bruno Schröder became the central figure in the German welfare system in London and was involved in a number of German-British associations. However, in contrast to his partner Frank Tiarks (and his German relative Kurt von Schröder ), he stayed away from political engagement. In recognition of his services to the Germans in London, he was elevated to the Prussian baron status in 1904. He received royal permission to use this title in Great Britain, but this was revoked in 1920. In 1931 he founded the Rudolph & Clara Schröder Foundation to support impoverished family members. On his 70th birthday in 1937, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Medical Faculty of the University of Hamburg for his work for the Deutsche Hospital in Hackney .

Bruno Schröder played a decisive role as chairman of the community association of the German Evangelical Churches in Great Britain in the dispute between the parishes and the Berlin Church Foreign Office under Theodor Heckel in the context of the church struggle in 1933/34. Here he supported the attitude of Dietrich Bonhoeffer , who was pastor of two parishes in London at the time, which led to the parishes' resolution of defection in November 1934.

From 1900 he lived in Dell Park near Windsor Castle , right next to his uncle's estate. He inherited his silver collection and was able to expand it through clever purchases into one of the largest private collections of European Renaissance silver.

literature

• Richard Roberts: Schroders: merchants and bankers. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan 1992 # ISBN 0333445112 ISBN 978-0333445112
• Richard Roberts: Schröder, (Rudolph) Bruno, Baron Schröder in the Prussian nobility [known as Baron Bruno] (1867-1940) , in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 1 Oct 2008
• Timothy Schroder: Renaissance silver from the Schroder Collection. With an essay by Deborah Lambert. London: The Wallace Collection 2007 ISBN 978-0-900785-96-2
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer: London 1933-1935 (Dietrich Bonhoeffer works, volume 13) Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus 1994 ISBN 3-579-01883-3

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See also the files of the Reich Chancellery

Web links

• Literature by and about Bruno Schröder in the catalog of the German National Library
• Bruno Schröder (banker) in the online version of the Reich Chancellery Files Edition . Weimar Republic