Language:
English
Year of publication:
2011
Titel der Quelle:
Leo Baeck Institute Year Book
Angaben zur Quelle:
56 (2011) 221-245
Keywords:
Solmssen, Georg Adlof
;
Jews History 1933-1939
;
Jews History 1800-2000
;
Jews Economic conditions
Abstract:
Georg Solmssen (1869-1957) was born in Berlin to a notable German Jewish family as Georg Adolf Salomonsohn; in 1910 he was baptized as a Protestant and changed his last name. From his family, Solmssen inherited not only the Disconto-Gesellschaft, which in 1929 merged with the Deutsche Bank, but also a deep German patriotism and a conservative worldview. Before 1933 he refused to admit the seriousness of German antisemitism; warning against the radicalism of the Nazi program, he at the same time dismissed Nazi antisemitism as an unimportant issue. Fighting against what he perceived as an immoral commercial culture, Solmssen was prone to ascribe it to some financiers of Jewish origin. In the aftermath of the banking crisis of 1931, banks in Germany were attacked as being Jewish; in 1933 many banks, anticipating the Nazi measures, began to purge their Jewish employees and directors. The ruling Nazi regime, which ventured to Aryanize the German economy, dismissed Solmssen from all his positions and seized his property; the directorate of the Deutsche Bank and the companies of which he was a board member acted hand in hand with the regime. Solmssen's protests and appeals to his former friends from the business world were in vain. He survived the war period in Switzerland, and his sons emigrated to the USA. Paradoxically, postwar Germany refused to compensate Solmssen for any of his losses, regarding him as a man who, together with other German capitalists, had put Hitler into power. Solmssen's story offers a unique insight into the tragedy of German-Jewish integration.
DOI:
10.1093/leobaeck/ybr007
URL:
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