Moritz John Elsas

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Moritz Julius (John) Elsas (born December 25, 1881 in Frankfurt am Main ; died April 18, 1952 in London ) was a German-British economist .

Life and activity

After attending school, Elsas studied political science and economics . During the First World War he worked in the arms administration. In 1918 he did his doctorate in Frankfurt with the unprinted dissertation investigations into the Frankfurt armaments industry with special consideration of the work and wage conditions and the food supply of the workers to the Dr. rer. pole. He then worked as a private scholar.

Between 1919 and 1924 Elsas calculated the cost of living for a working-class family, first for Frankfurt and Berlin, then for other cities, and compiled an index of social prosperity, which appeared every two months from 1924 and later weekly.

Since 1929 Elsas worked as a founding member and since 1930 as head of the German section of the International Scientific Committee for the History of Prizes of the Rockefeller Foundation, an outline of a history of prizes and wages in Germany (2 vols. 1936–1940).

After coming to power of the Nazis in the spring of 1933 Elsa emigrated to Britain . There he worked for John Maynard Keynes and the Manchester Guardian . He also became a lecturer at the London School of Economics and Social Research , on whose behalf he studied British national income, particularly in the years 1924 to 1938. As a result of his surveys for the Population Investigation Committee , he published Housing before the War and after (1942) and Housing and the Family (1947).

At the end of the 1930s, Elsas was classified as an enemy of the state by the police forces of National Socialist Germany. In the spring of 1940 the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they should be removed from the occupation troops in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Subsequent SS special commands were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

Since 1948 Elsas was entrusted with research tasks for the Cabinet Office in London.

family

Elsas married Esther Margarete Firnberg (born August 5, 1885 in London) in 1912 .

Fonts

  • The level of the cost of living. Index figures for promoting sliding pay , Frankfurt / M. 1920.
  • Outline of a history of prices and wages in Germany , 2 vol., 1936–1940.
  • Housing before the War and after , 1942. (Reprinted 1945)
  • Housing and the Family , 1947.

literature

  • Paul Arnsberg: History of the Frankfurt Jews , vol. 3, p. 107.
  • German Biographical Encyclopedia , Vol. 3 (Einstein-Görner), Munich 2006, p. 40.
  • Ulrich Scheurle: Elsas, Moritz Julius. In: Harald Hagemann , Claus-Dieter Krohn (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking economic emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Adler – Lehmann. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11284-X , pp. 138-139.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d Elsas, Moritz John. Hessian biography. (As of February 15, 2013). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).
  2. ↑ Julien Demade, Produire un fait scientifique. Beveridge et le Comité international d'histoire des prix , Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2018, pp. 46, 56–57, 99.
  3. ^ Entry on Elsas on the special wanted list (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .
personal data
SURNAME Elsa, Moritz John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Elsas, Moritz Julius; Elsas, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-British economist
DATE OF BIRTH December 25, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH April 18, 1952
Place of death London