Henry Grunfeld

German-Jewish banker, prominent in the development of investment banking and the growth of London as a financial centre following the Second World War. Grunfeld was co-founder of S.G. Warburg, which became the preeminent UK-based investment bank by the early 1990s and "the biggest force in post-world-war merchant banking". While the firm had been named after his colleague Siegmund Warburg, whose family were already long established in banking in Germany and the United States, upon Grunfelds death it was noted that "Warburg, Grunfeld and Company would have been the more accurate style". In April 1934, following the rise of Hitler, Grunfeld was arrested by the Gestapo without warrant or charge and jailed for fifty-four hours. He was able to use his status as an honorary Consul of Spain to avoid deportation to a concentration camp and fled to London with his family shortly after the Night of the Long Knives. His family business became the subject of Aryanization and was plundered by the Nazis, and after the application of the various Nazi capital flight taxes and exchange controls, almost all Grunfelds personal assets were also confiscated: he arrived in the United Kingdom with £4,000 (equal to just 7.5% of his companys original book value at the time of its founding in 1898). Many members of his family remained in Germany and were killed during the Third Reich. While Grunfeld was later highly active with post-war German industrial companies, he never returned to Berlin and made no post-war restitution claim. Henry Grunfeld died on 10 June 1999, aged 95, in London, England. Link to Wikipedia biography Read less