Henry Strakosch

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Sir Henry Strakosch (born May 10, 1871 in Hohenau an der March , Lower Austria , † October 30, 1943 near London ) was a British-Austrian banker and businessman of Jewish descent. From 1924 he was chairman of the supervisory board of the South African mining company Union Corporation .

Live and act

Henry Strakosch was born in 1871 as a scion of the Austrian entrepreneur family Strakosch . His parents were the businessman Eduard Strakosch and his wife Mathilde, née Winterstein. In his youth Strakotsch attended the Wasa-Gymnasium in Vienna. He then worked at the Anglo-Austrian Bank in order to move to South Africa in the 1890s.

In 1907 Strakosch took on British citizenship. As he grew older, he took on numerous important offices in the British financial world: in 1925 and 1926 he was a member of the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance. Between 1930 and 1937 Strakosch also sat on the British Council for India, before serving as advisor to the British Minister of India from 1937 to 1942.

In his capacity as advisor to the South African government on financial matters, he was the author of the South African Currency and Banking Act. From 1929 to 1943 he was also chairman of the board of the newspaper The Economist .

In 1921 he was knighted as a Knight Bachelor , in 1924 as Knight Commander in the Order of the British Empire and in 1927 raised to the Knight Grand Cross of this order.

Churchill's financier

In 1938 Strakosch paid off Winston Churchill's private debts . Due to Strakosch's Jewish ancestry, this was later cited by the National Socialists as evidence of the links between Judaism and British politics. Bernard Baruch , a powerful Jewish banker and friend of Churchill, had given him stock recommendations that failed. Churchill had become insolvent in the spring of 1938 as a result of these stock speculations. Its American stocks had fallen rapidly because of the Roosevelt recession. Churchill could not repay the money borrowed for this to the bank. Then Henry Strakosch stepped on the scene, paid off the debt and took over the fallen shares. Churchill's loss of £ 12,000 in 1938 was equivalent to losing about $ 500,000 in 2005.

Fonts

  • The South African Currency and Exchange Problem , Johannesburg 1920.
  • The South African Currency and Exchange Problem Re-Examined , Johannesburg 1922.
  • Monetary Stability and the Gold Standard , London 1928.
  • A Financial Plan for the Prevention of War , London 1929.
  • The crisis. A memorandum , supplement to The Economist on January 9, 1932.

literature

  • Harold Gilmore Calhoun: Les théories de Sir Henry Strakosch en matière de crise et la crise de 1929–1933. Loviton, Paris 1933.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Knights and Dames at Leigh Rayment's Peerage
  2. ↑ Cf. Stefan Scheil: Churchill, Hitler and anti-Semitism: the German dictatorship, its political opponents and the European crisis of 1938/39. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2008, p. 104
personal data
SURNAME Strakosch, Henry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British-Austrian banker and businessman of Jewish descent
DATE OF BIRTH May 10, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH Hohenau an der March , Lower Austria
DATE OF DEATH October 30, 1943
Place of death near London