22 Facts About Oscar Wassermann

Biographers suggest that the relationship between the branch director cousins, Max and Oscar Wassermann, became fractious, however.

In 1912 Oscar Wassermann suddenly transferred to Deutsche Bank in Berlin.

Oscar Wassermann was offered and accepted a place on the Deutsche Bank executive board, taking over responsibility for the bank's stock exchange trading business jointly with co-director Paul Mankiewitz, who was probably the man who persuaded Oscar Wassermann to make this career defining move.

Oscar Wassermann took a lead in the handling of Deutsche Bank's international relations, becoming, in 1925, a member of the 14 member General Council responsible for administering the Reichsbank German Republic through years of exceptional economical challenge.

Between 1923 and 1933 Oscar Wassermann acted as spokesman for the Deutsche Bank executive board.

Oscar Wassermann was succeeded in the role, briefly, by the banker Georg Solmssen.

Oscar Wassermann was an unusually heavy smoker and he was overweight.

Five weeks later, in the middle of May 1933, Oscar Wassermann turned up at the bank apparently fully restored.

On 29 May 1933 Oscar Wassermann's resignation was announced: his apparently amicable and consensual departure was completed well before the end of the year.

Oscar Wassermann married firstly Hungarian-born Margarethe "Grete" Furst and secondly Katharina "Kathe" Haupt, the widow of Prof.

Oscar Wassermann died on 8 September 1934, "a broken man", the year after his "retirement".

In terms of family background, Oscar Wassermann came from the increasingly prominent class of "haut-bourgeois" German-Jewish bankers that had emerged in parallel with the expansion of a commercial and industrial middle class during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Oscar Wassermann had himself received and absorbed a powerfully orthodox upbringing.

Oscar Wassermann was deeply learned in the faith and strongly committed to Judaism: he saw no reason to keep that commitment private.

Oscar Wassermann was engaged actively in a number of Jewish social and charitable organisations.

Oscar Wassermann never joined any German-Jewish political movements, but was nevertheless widely viewed as a Zionist.

Oscar Wassermann became chairman of the German offshoot of "judische Palastinawerkes" and of the associated funding operation, "Palastina Grundfonds e V", established in 1922 with the primary objective of acquiring land in Palestine.

Oscar Wassermann served as deputy chairman of the "Verein zur Grundung und Erhaltung einer Akademie fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums", founded in 1919 to create and maintain an academy of Judaic Sciences and Humanities: he organised fundraising on the association's behalf.

Long before 1933 Oscar Wassermann was the focus of violent antisemitic agitation.

Oscar Wassermann was identified, unfairly, as one of those responsible for the so-called "Versailles Treaty of Shame", and defamed as a "representative of Jewish high finance".

However, shortly before the annual general meeting of 1933, over which Oscar Wassermann was scheduled to preside in his capacity as "Sprecher", colleagues announced his retirement "on grounds of age".

The painting hit the headlines there in 2013, with a dispute as to its ownership between the Sao Paulo Museum of Art, which had accepted it in good faith as a donation, and surviving heirs of Oscar Wassermann, forced to sell it in 1936 in order to escape what turned out to be the looming Holocaust.