Theodor Plaut (economist)

Theodor Friedrich Stephan Leberecht Plaut (born October 14, 1888 in Leipzig ; died November 14, 1948 in London ) was a German economist.

Life and activity

Early years

Plaut was a son of the bacteriologist Hugo Carl Plaut (1858–1928), who taught as an associate professor at the University of Hamburg, and most recently served as director of the fungal research institute in the University Hospital Eppendorf. His paternal grandfather came from Nordhausen in Thuringia and was a banker in Leipzig. The maternal grandfather, Rudolph Brach, was a merchant and shipowner in Hamburg.

After attending the humanistic Wilhelmsgymnasium in Hamburg, which he left with the Abitur in 1908, Plaut studied economics at the universities of Freiburg, Berlin and Munich. In 1912 he received his doctorate in political science with a thesis on trade union struggle among German doctors, supervised by Karl Diehl and Gerhart Schulze-Gävernitz .

From 1912 to 1914 Plaut volunteered at banks in Leipzig, Berlin, Hamburg and London. In London he attended two semesters of lectures at the London School of Economics.

At the beginning of the First World War, Plaut was initially classified as unfit, but in 1916 he was drafted into the Landsturm and deployed in Russia, Macedonia and Upper Alsace before he was released in early 1918 because of an exacerbation of an eye disease and an inflammation of the knee. During the Hamburg Spartakist riots of 1919 he was a member of the Hamburg Freikorps Bahrenfeld . In the months before and after his compulsory military service, Plaut was a research assistant (assistant) to Bernhard Harms at the Institute for Shipping and World Economy at Kiel University. In August 1918 he moved to the central office of the Hamburg Colonial Institute.

Worked at the University of Hamburg (1920 to 1933)

In October 1920, Plaut joined the Department of Economics and Colonial Policy at the University of Hamburg. In 1922 he completed his habilitation there in economics with a thesis on the origin, nature and meaning of Whitleyism, the English variant of works councils, and was permanently accepted into the university service as a scientific assistant: He gave his inaugural lecture on the nature and meaning of guild socialism. In 1924 he was appointed professor by the city's senate for the duration of his membership of the university.

The main subjects of Plaut's lectures were trade, commercial and social policy as well as monetary, banking and stock exchange affairs. From 1927 lectures on finance were added.

A few months after the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Plaut was dismissed from civil service on July 31, 1933 on the basis of the law to restore the professional civil service due to his - according to National Socialist definition - Jewish descent and his activities in the Social Democratic Party: after the National Socialist Student Union the university authorities had sought out Plaut, he was advised not to give the lectures that had been announced for the summer semester. Soon thereafter, he was dismissed as a research assistant, his teaching license was withdrawn and his title as professor was lost.

emigration

Plaut then emigrated to Great Britain: from 1933 to 1935 he was a visiting lecturer at Hull University . From 1935 he worked at the Coal Research Institute at Leeds University.

At the beginning of 1939 Plaut was stripped of its German citizenship. His property was confiscated. Classified by the National Socialist police as an enemy of the state, the Reich Main Security Office put him on the special wanted list GB in the spring of 1940 , a list of people who, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the German armed forces, would give special priority to subsequent SS special commands should be located and arrested.

In his early works, Plaut devoted himself to questions of money and banking and the financing of war, especially with the much-discussed slogan "Money stays in the country" at the time. Otherwise, his work is almost exclusively devoted to two other topics: foreign trade policy and labor market or social policy (with a focus on trade unionism and arbitration procedures) on the other.

family

Since 1920 Plaut was married to Ellen Warburg, a daughter of the banker Abraham Warburg from the well-known banking family.

Fonts

• The union struggle of the German doctors , 1913.
• The impact of war on the London money market , Jena 1915.
• The Importance of Dumping in Current English Trade Policy , 1921.
• Origin, nature and meaning of Whitleyism. The English type of works councils , 1922.
• England on the way to industrial protection. Key Industries and Trade Policy .
• Problems of English trade policy . In: F. Eulenburg (ed.): New foundations of trade policy .
• German trade policy. An introduction , 1929.
• Unemployment in the United States of America and the various measures taken to combat it , 1932.

literature

• In: Harald Hagemann , Claus-Dieter Krohn (ed.): Biographical handbook of German-speaking economic emigration after 1933. Volume 2: Leichter branch. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11284-X , pp. 531-533.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Theodor Plaut in the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .