Georg Solmssen

Georg Solmssen (around 1928)

Georg Solmssen (actually Georg Adolf Salomonsohn ) (born August 7, 1869 in Berlin , † January 10, 1957 in Lugano ) was a German banker. He was one of the business owners of Disconto-Gesellschaft and in 1933 spokesman for the board of Deutsche Bank . He became famous for his letter of April 9, 1933 , in which he foresaw the intentions of the Hitler regime with regard to the Jewish people . Solmssen's nephew Arthur Solmssen takes up the story of the banking family in his novel A Princess in Berlin (1980).

Life

Georg Salomonsohn was born as the son of the former owner of the Disconto-Gesellschaft Adolph Salomonsohn (1831–1919) and his wife Sara, b. Rinkel, born. After high school he studied law . He graduated with a doctorate to become a Dr. jur. on the building trade legislation. He then entered the Prussian judicial service and worked, among other things, as a court assessor in Frankfurt (Oder) .

On April 2, 1900, the lawyer converted from Judaism to Protestantism , and on August 10 of the same year he changed his family name from Solomonsohn to Solmssen.

Also in 1900 he left the civil service as a court assessor and joined the Disconto-Gesellschaft. In 1904 he was promoted to director there, with the focus of his activity on the Romanian oil industry. On November 5, 1911, he was accepted into the group of business owners of the bank.

Georg Solmssen was particularly specialized in industrial finance. He maintained close contacts to the coal and steel industry in the west of the German Empire . In addition, he reformed the Schaaffhausen'schen Bankverein and prepared its merger with the Disconto-Gesellschaft in 1914.

As before the First World War , Solmssen was in the USA on various business trips after the war . There he contributed significantly to the reconnection of Germany to the international telegraph network. He was therefore also chairman of the supervisory board of the German-American Telegraph Company. Solmssen also held supervisory board mandates in other large companies. These included Lufthansa AG and Vereinigte Stahlwerke . He was also a member of the boards of directors of the Reichsbank and the Reichspost . From 1929 he was the Romanian consul general and in the same year he joined the Jewish Society of Friends . He was also a member of the Provisional Reich Economic Council . From 1930 to 1933 he was chairman of the Central Association of the German Banking and Banking Industry. He was also a member of the German Men's Club .

In addition, Solmssen was also active as a lecturer. He published these contributions in 1934 in two volumes as contributions to German politics and economics 1900–1933 . In 1928 he renewed the Adolph Salomonsohn Foundation established by his father to promote the study of natural sciences as the Adolph and Sara Salomonson and Georg Solmssen Foundation, which was probably dissolved in 1941.

After the Disconto-Gesellschaft merged with Deutsche Bank in 1929, he was a member of the board of directors. After the Jewish board spokesman Oscar Wassermann had been ousted from office before the 1933 general meeting, Solmssen became board spokesman for a short time and chaired the annual general meeting of 1933. In 1934 he himself was ousted from the board and emigrated to Switzerland, but still belonged to 1937 to the supervisory board of the Deutsche Bank und Disconto-Gesellschaft.

Quote

Shortly after the beginning of National Socialist rule , he correctly stated that the National Socialists aimed at the economic annihilation of the Jews. In a famous letter to Franz Urbig on April 9, 1933, he wrote:

"Dear Mr. Urbig, The expulsion of the Jews from civil service, which has now been carried out by law, raises the question of what consequences these measures, also taken for granted by the educated part of the people, will have for the private economy. I fear that we are still at the beginning of a development which, according to a well-planned plan, is aimed purposefully at the economic and moral annihilation of all members of the Jewish race living in Germany, completely without distinction. The complete passivity of the classes not belonging to the National Socialist Party, the lack of any feeling of solidarity that emerges on the part of those who have previously worked shoulder to shoulder with Jewish colleagues in the companies in question, the increasingly obvious urge to get out of the To take advantage of the post and the silence of the shame and harm that are indivisibly inflicted on all those who, although innocent, see the basis of their honor and existence destroyed overnight - all this shows a situation so hopeless that it would be a mistake, not to look things in the face without trying to gloss over things. "

- Georg Solmssen, 1933

literature

• Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (Hrsg.): Acta Borussica. New series, series 1: The minutes of the Prussian State Ministry 1817–1934 / 38. Volume 12, 2: Reinhold Zilch, Bärbel Holtz : April 4, 1925 to May 10, 1938. Olms-Weidmann, Hildesheim et al. 2004, ISBN 3-487-12704-0 , p. 702, ( digitized version (PDF; 2.2 MB) ).
• Gerald D. Feldman: Jewish bankers and the crises of the Weimar Republic (= Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture. 39, ZDB -ID 415081-8 ). Leo Baeck Institute, New York NY 1995.
• Harold James , Martin L. Müller (ed.): Georg Solmssen - a German banker. Letters from half a century 1900–1956 (= series of publications for the journal for corporate history. 25). Published on behalf of the Historical Society of Deutsche Bank eV CH Beck, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-406-62795-8 .
• Martin L. Müller:  Solmssen, Georg Adolf. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , pp. 557 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

Commons : Georg Solmssen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Georg Solmssen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Georg Solmssen in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Biography of the historical society of Deutsche Bank

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Quoted from Harold James: The Deutsche Bank in the Third Reich. CH Beck, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-406-50955-X , p. 48.