Eric M. Warburg

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Eric M. Warburg (born April 15, 1900 in Hamburg as Erich Hermann Max Warburg ; † July 9, 1990 there ) was an internationally respected German - American banker and political advisor from the important Warburg family in Hamburg . Eric M. Warburg founded the New York investment bank Warburg Pincus in 1938 and was a partner in the Hamburg private bank MMWarburg & CO . As a co-founder of the American Council on Germany and the Atlantik-Brücke , Eric M. Warburg is one of the greatest promoters of German-American relations in post-war Germany.

Life

family

Eric M. Warburg was born on April 15, 1900 as the eldest son of the banker and political advisor Max Moritz Warburg (1867-1946) into the family line of the Mittelweg-Warburgs based on Hamburg-Rotherbaum into a wealthy, conservative Jewish banking family. His father ran the family-owned Hamburg MMWarburg & CO -Bank in the fourth generation. a. political influence as advisor to Kaiser Wilhelm II and member of the Hamburg citizenship . His uncles were the internationally important bankers Paul Moritz Warburg (1868–1932), Felix M. Warburg (1871–1931) and Fritz M. Warburg (1879–1962). Another uncle was the art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929), founder of the Warburg Institute in London .

Eric M. Warburg's sister Lola Nina Hahn-Warburg (1901–1989) was the lover of Chaim Weizmann , then President of the World Zionist Organization and first President of the newly founded State of Israel . Lola Nina Hahn-Warburg has been an active member of the board of the Reich Representation of Jews in Germany since 1933 . Together with her other sister Anita Wolf-Warburg (1908–2008), Lola was particularly involved in looking after German-Jewish refugees in Great Britain, especially in the organization and implementation of the Kindertransporte 1938/39. Negotiations by a delegation in 1938 led by Chaim Weizmann and Lola Hahn-Warburg's involvement with the British Home Office succeeded in getting the British Government and the British House of Commons to emigrate to Britain an unlimited number of children . Over 10,000 Jewish children were saved in this way. Eric M. Warburg's third sister, Gisela Warburg Wyzanski (1912–1991), headed the office of the child and youth Aliyah in Berlin at the time of National Socialism , emigrated to the United States in 1939 and was involved there as a board member of Hadassah for Zionism . Eric M. Warburg emigrated to the United States in September 1938, took American citizenship and anglicized his German name Erich M. Warburg to Eric M. Warburg.

Warburg grave, Ohlsdorf cemetery

After Eric M. Warburg returned to New York from World War II in September 1945 as an award-winning US officer, he married Dorothea Thorsch (1912–2003) on Valentine's Day in 1946. His son Max M. Warburg Jr. (born 1948 in New York) has been a partner since 1982 and has been Deputy Chairman of the Supervisory Board since 2014 of MMWarburg & CO, which is now one of the largest private banks in Germany. Eric M. Warburg's daughter Marie is married to the former publisher of the Hamburg weekly newspaper Die Zeit and former Minister of State for Culture Michael Naumann . His daughter Erica Warburg lives in Hamburg. Eric M. Warburg was the grandfather of four grandchildren.

Eric M. Warburg died of pneumonia in Blankenese at the age of ninety . He was buried in the Hamburg cemetery Ohlsdorf , grid square R 26 (across from the Trumm mausoleum ).

Acting as a banker and officer in the US Army

Eric M. Warburg's training as a banker took him to Berlin , Frankfurt am Main and London , where he gained experience at the NM Rothschild & Sons banking house . The Rothschilds and Warburgs exchanged volunteers regularly at that time. In 1923 Erich M. Warburg went to New York to join his uncle Paul Warburg's International Acceptance Bank . He met several times a week with John Foster Dulles , who decades later served as the United States Secretary of State .

First National Bank building in Portland, Oregon

In 1924 he accepted a job with the First National Bank in Portland, Oregon . He then worked again in New York for the American and Continental Corporation , a subsidiary of the International Acceptance Bank , which brokered loans to Europe. In 1926 he returned to Hamburg and worked from then on in MMWarburg & CO of his father Max M. Warburg. In January 1927 he was granted the individual power of attorney. In 1929 he became a partner at MMWarburg & CO in Hamburg and at Warburg & Company in Amsterdam . Eric M. Warburg became a member of the German-English Society founded in 1935 .

After emigrating to the USA, he founded the investment bank EM Warburg & Co. on Wall Street in 1938 in the New York building of the Kuhn, Loeb & Co. bank at 52 William Street , which hungered for well-founded assessments of German war strategies at the beginning of the Second World War , Eric M. Warburg was considered an omniscient sage. When war broke out in 1939, the dispossessed Nazis the silent participation of his family at the "Aryanised" family's MM Warburg & CO . After Stalin's invasion of Finland in the winter of 1939, Warburg became managing director of an export-import bank founded at the behest of the Finnish US ambassador, which operated under the name Finnish-American-Trading Company. The offices were also located in the Kuhn, Loeb & Co. building at 52 William Street in New York. It was through this company that Eric M. Warburg sent necessary war material such as fighter planes, trucks and food to Finland. Ultimately, however, the aid turned out to be insufficient and the Finns asked for an armistice in March 1940.

During the Second World War, Eric M. Warburg served in the US Army from 1941 to 1945 after the attack on Pearl Harbor . The US armed forces urgently needed men who spoke fluent German and who knew the political and geographical realities of Germany, the enemy of the war. After training as an officer in Florida, he attended a US Air Force intelligence school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and completed his staff duty in Washington. At his own request, Eric M. Warburg was posted to England in 1943 and worked as a liaison officer between the General Staffs of the US Air Force and the British Royal Air Force (RAF). In England he was trained in a secret interrogation center in Buckinghamshire , where British agents were taking German prisoners of war into the mangle.

Eric M. Warburg landed with the Allied forces in North Africa in November 1942 . After the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, he scouted positions for the Air Force. During an illness-related break, he did some chores at the Pentagon in Washington. From here he ensured that Lübeck's old town was not bombed again and completely destroyed after the air raid of March 29, 1942 , as was originally planned by the British Royal Air Force. He worked with his cousin Carl Jacob Burckhardt - then chairman of an auxiliary commission of the International Committee of the Red Cross and later an honorary citizen of Lübeck - to protect the old Hanseatic city from renewed air raids by the English. Within 48 hours, the government in London received the notification from the Red Cross that the mail, letters, packages and parcels for the British prisoners of war in Germany were being stored and handled in Lübeck. Lübeck was removed from the Bomber Command's target list. In honor of Warburg, a new bridge over the Trave was named after him, the Eric Warburg Bridge .

During his flying visit to the Pentagon in 1943, he also took care of the planning staff for the design of post-war Germany so that, contrary to the original plan, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein did not fall into the Soviet zone and that the Elbe would form the future border. Eric M. Warburg's next assignment was to put together a news unit for the upcoming D-Day invasion of Normandy. In June 1944, he took with this unit on the Allied landing in Normandy in part. He then worked with a small group of American and British officers in the liberation of Paris in August 1944. A little later, Eric M. Warburg took care of the surviving resistance fighters of July 20, 1944 . In the turbulent days of the end of the war shortly before Germany's surrender in May 1945, Lt. Col. Eric M. Warburg, as a lieutenant colonel in the intelligence service of the US Air Force, started a daring undertaking with which he got ahead of the Soviets: With jeeps and trucks, he took 160 German scientists and their families out of East Germany within three weeks and brought them into custody of the US armed forces to Bad Kissingen to the Hotel Wittelsbacher Hof. These included specialists in nuclear research and the V2 rockets . Among them Wernher von Braun and numerous scientists who later participated in the American space program. He also met his friend, biochemist and Nobel laureate Otto Warburg , who was distantly related to him and who continued to work as a scientist in the Third Reich, unmolested by the National Socialists.

As head of interrogation of prisoners of war of the US Air Force, Eric M. Warburg conducted the first interrogations of leading Wehrmacht officers on European soil, including Generals Halder and von Falkenhausen . In May 1945 he spoke to Hermann Göring , the head of the German Air Force, for over 20 hours in Augsburg . For Eric M. Warburg's service in the war, the Americans awarded him the Legion of Merit , the British the Order of the British Empire and the French the Croix de Guerre Cross . In September 1945 Eric M. Warburg returned to New York.

In 1949 the Warburg family confidante John Jay McCloy was appointed by the US government as High Commissioner for Germany and was thus the most important representative of the Allies in post-war Germany. Eric M. Warburg had known McCloy since the 1920s, when he was working as a lawyer for the Warburgs and Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York and personal ties had also been established. As Deputy High Commissioner with special responsibility for financial issues McCloy's longtime friend and confidant Warburg was Benjamin Buttenwieser , investment banker and partner of the New York banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. appointed. Shortly after taking office, Eric M. Warburg was one of McCloy's first guests in Bonn. In a conversation Warburg advocated that the dismantling of German industrial companies should be stopped completely, otherwise nothing good could grow out of post-war Germany. McCloy initially reacted negatively, but in the end he campaigned for twelve German industrial groups to stop dismantling and put it into practice. Shortly thereafter, Eric M. Warburg and John Jay McCloy founded the Atlantik-Brücke in Hamburg and the sister organization American Council on Germany in New York to promote German-American economic, military and cultural relations in post-war Germany. "McCloy's thinking was deeply influenced by Eric M. Warburg," said German diplomat Walther Leisler Kiep .

In 1948 the Warburg family got their confiscated land and property back. In 1949 Warburg joined Brinkmann, Wirtz & Co. as a limited partner , as MM Warburg & CO was called since October 27, 1941 on the instructions of the Reich Government. From 1956 to 1982 he was a personal partner in the fifth generation of the bank, which had been trading as MM Warburg-Brinkmann, Wirtz & Co. since January 5, 1970 and thus again referred to its founders. His son Max M. Warburg Jr. (born in New York in 1948) took over his father's shareholder status in 1982 in the sixth generation and has been Deputy Chairman of the Supervisory Board of MM Warburg & CO since 2014 .

Transatlantic Relations

Eric M. Warburg was grateful for the "asylum he had been granted in America" ​​and tried to strengthen the friendly relations between Germany and the USA. During his life he endeavored to reconcile the two countries and to deepen transatlantic relations. In 1952, together with the American lawyer John Jay McCloy , he founded the Atlantik-Brücke in Hamburg and, at the same time, the sister organization American Council on Germany in New York . The elite organizations initially made a significant contribution to German-American reconciliation and today ensure personal exchange between German and American executives from politics, diplomacy, the military, business, finance and culture.

In his honor, the Atlantik-Brücke awarded the Eric M. Warburg Prize between 1988 and 2014 . He himself was the first to receive the award. The laudation was given by the then Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker , who described the honoree as "the bridge across the Atlantic". Warburg u. a. Henry Kissinger , Otto Graf Lambsdorff and George HW Bush . On July 2, 2012, the former Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt received the Eric M. Warburg Prize .

Others

  • In June 1945 Eric M. Warburg organized and financed the move of Rabbi Leo Baeck to London after he had survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp .
  • Eric M. Warburg was a close friend of the former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt . For a meeting between Schmidt and Edward Gierek , the Polish leader of the Communist Party, he made his yacht “Atalanta” available.
  • Eric M. Warburg is the founder of the German Association of Sponsors of the University of Haifa eV , Hamburg.
  • In 1985 the Senate of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg awarded him the Mayor Stolten Medal .
  • The Elsa Brändström House in Hamburg-Rissen, named after the legendary Red Cross sister Elsa Brändström , known as the "Angel of Siberia", dates back to Eric M. Warburg's initiative . Warburg provided the necessary financial means to develop the Warburg family's former holiday residence into an international educational and meeting place.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Volker Reinhardt, Thomas Lau: German families: historical portraits from Bismarck to Weizsäcker. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2005, page 280
  2. New York Times Archives: Gisela Warburg Wyzanski, Zionist Leader, 79. The New York Times, July 7, 1991
  3. inscription grave stone at fredriks.de
  4. → approximate grave location
  5. Ron Chernow: The Warburgs - A family odyssey. Siedler-Verlag, Munich, 1994, pages 429-430
  6. Ron Chernow: The Warburgs - A family odyssey. Siedler-Verlag, Munich, 1994, page 566
  7. Ron Chernow: The Warburgs - A family odyssey. Siedler-Verlag, Munich, 1994, pages 588-589
  8. Ron Chernow: The Warburgs - A family odyssey. Siedler-Verlag, Munich, 1994, page 628
  9. ^ Günther Stiller: On the 100th birthday of Eric M. Warburg. Hamburger Abendblatt, April 17, 2000
  10. How Lübeck was saved . Time online. November 14, 1986. Retrieved December 28, 2013.
  11. Uwe Bahnsen: Banker Warburg - The man who saved Lübeck from the bombs. Die Welt, August 25, 2013 (with photo by Eric M. Warburg)
  12. Ron Chernow: The Warburgs - A family odyssey. Siedler-Verlag, Munich, 1994, pages 628-632
  13. Uwe Bahnsen: Banker Warburg - The man who saved Lübeck from the bombs. Die Welt, August 25, 2013
  14. Vain to death. Cicero - magazine for political culture
  15. ^ Günther Stiller: On the 100th birthday of Eric M. Warburg. Hamburger Abendblatt, April 17, 2000
  16. Ludger Kühnhardt: Atlantik Brücke: 50 Years of German-American Partnership , p. 24
  17. ^ Walther Leisler Kiep : Bridge Builder. An Insider's Account of Over 60 Years in Postwar Reconstruction, International Diplomacy, and German-American Relation . P. 205
  18. ↑ Acceptance speech by Helmut Schmidt . Atlantik-Brücke eV. July 2, 2012. Archived from the original on December 17, 2013. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved December 28, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.atlantik-bruecke.org
  19. Helmut Schmidt, companions. Memories and Reflections, Berlin 1998, p. 161.