Siegfried Aufhäuser (banker)

Siegfried Aufhäuser (born May 11, 1877 in Munich , † January 27, 1949 in the USA ) was a German-British banker and consul general of the Kingdom of Sweden .

Bankhaus H. Aufhäuser in Munich, Löwengrube 20 with founder Heinrich Aufhäuser and his sons Martin and Siegfried, around 1905

Life

He was the son of the banker Heinrich Aufhäuser (1842–1917), who together with Samuel Scharlach had founded the Aufhäuser & Scharlach bank in Munich on May 14, 1870 , the balance sheet total of which had already quintupled in the first few years from 1870 to 1876. After Heinrich Aufhäuser had paid out his former partner Scharlach by 1892, the institute traded under the name Bankhaus H. Aufhäuser from 1894. The bank quickly gained a good reputation and soon counted among others. a. Duke Luitpold in Bavaria and the family of Thomas Mann as well as Neuberger and Einstein ( Alfred Einstein ) to their customers. At the turn of the century, the bank, which initially specialized in securities commission business , became a high-turnover credit institution. In 1913, H. Aufhäuser's total assets for the first time exceeded 10 million gold marks .

Siegfried Aufhäuser completed a bank training and worked as a banker in London from 1901. In 1906 he took on British citizenship. After the death of his father, Siegfried, who had lived in England for 16 years, took over the bank together with his older brother Martin Aufhäuser . In 1922 he became a personally liable partner there. Since the Aufhäusers belonged to the Jewish faith, the bank was exposed to massive reprisals and it lost a large part of its customers - through coercive measures ( Jewish boycott etc.), emigration or deportation .

Bankhaus H. Aufhäuser was “ forced to argue ” as a result of the so-called Reichspogromnacht at the beginning of November and in December 1938 Friedrich Wilhelm Seiler took over the bank; H. Aufhäuser was thus one of the last private banks and one of the most important to be “Aryanized” in this way.

Siegfried Aufhäuser, who was also Consul General for the Kingdom of Sweden (from 1923) and Commander of the Wasa Order , was forced to emigrate to Great Britain in 1938 and then to the USA the following year, where he died in 1949.

literature

• Herrmann AL Degener : Degeners Who is it? Berlin 1935, p. 42.

Web links

• Literature by and about Siegfried Aufhäuser in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Aufhäuser, Siegfried. In: Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss : Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1. Saur, Munich 1980.
2. ↑ Dr. Felix Höpfner: Independent - Personal - Entrepreneurial A chronicle of Hauck & Aufhäuser private bankers . Ed .: Hauck & Aufhäuser Privatbankiers. ISBN 978-3-937996-31-8 , pp. 108 .