Paul Wallich

Paul Wallich (1882–1938) was a German banker and son of the banker Hermann Wallich, one of the founders of Deutsche Bank.[1] An assimilated Jew, who considered himself Christian, he rose to become a partner in the bank Dreyfus & Co. Wallich was also a scholar and a book collector, with a collection of 30,000 volumes.[2]

When the Nazis rose to power, Wallich and his bank were persecuted due to Jewish heritage. The bank was Aryanized,[3] that is transferred to a non-Jewish owner, Merck Finck & Co., a Munich-based bank. He signed a 10-year consulting contract for 50,000 marks per year.

Wallich committed suicide in the aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom by drowning himself in the Rhine at Cologne.[3]

Notes
  1. Reinhard Frost, webdecker-www webdecker de, webdecker-. Hermann Wallich A Banker in Paris, Shanghai and Berlin.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  2. Engelbourg, Saul. "HENRY C. WALLICH: A THIRD GENERATION BANKER". In the early twentieth century; Paul published the standard text on the evolution (concentration) of German banking before 1900, followed several decades later by a study of Berlin entrepreneurs during the early industrialization. An avid reader and book collector, Paul accumulated a personal library of 30,000 volumes.
  3. r2WPadmin. "Expulsion – Plunder – Flight: Businessmen and Emigration from Nazi Germany". Immigrant Entrepreneurship. Retrieved 2022-02-08. One tragic example was the banker Paul Wallich (1882–1938), who had been running the Berlin branch of the Frankfurt private bank J. Dreyfus & Co. since 1919.[72] In 1938, in the wake of the "Aryanization" of the Frankfurt parent house and the takeover of the Berlin branch by a Munich bank, Wallich had been given, as a condition for the transaction, a ten-year consultant contract with an annual salary of 50,000 RM ($20,000 in 1938 U.S. dollars; $311,000 in 2010 U.S. dollars). As a young man, Wallich had spent multiple stints abroad from 1907 to 1910 in preparation for his future work as a banker—in London, Paris, New York, and South America—and, given his international experience, emigration abroad seemed to offer a way out.[73] Nevertheless, Wallich's ties to Germany were too strong for him to make the decision to leave the country permanently, especially since he had to expect a worse professional position and a lower standard of living abroad. Added to this was that he was presumably threatened with the termination of his contract in the fall of 1938.[74] By his own decision he returned to Berlin from a stay in New York, where the November pogrom and fear of being arrested made him flee to Cologne. Matters in Germany were "no longer bearable" to him, he wrote in a farewell letter to his son, and "I no longer have the energy to go abroad." The last message to his wife also conveyed his despair: "I am so tired… All the thousand cares and bothers that would come with my starting over—I don't even have the nerves to cross the border now, with or without passport."[75] On November 11, 1938, Wallich drowned himself in the Rhine near Cologne.
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