Escape after Hitler's election: easy or not?

In fact, during the war years, anti-Semitism rose in the United States, Jewish cemeteries and synagogues were vandalized and desecrated with swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans like, "Christ Killers," Jewish boys were beaten by gangs, and U.S. immigration laws made it more difficult, not easier, for Jews to escape Germany by migrating to the U.S.

July 11, 1990

Eric Warburg, 90, Investment Banker From Germany, Dies

By ALFONSO A. NARVAEZ
LEAD: Eric M. Warburg, an international banker and a member of the German banking family, died on Monday at his home in Hamburg, West Germany. He was 90 years old.

Eric M. Warburg, an international banker and a member of the German banking family, died on Monday at his home in Hamburg, West Germany. He was 90 years old.

He died of cardiac disease, his daughter, Dr. Marie Warburg, said.

Mr. Warburg retired in 1982 as a managing partner of M. M. Warburg, Brinckmann, Wirtz & Company, a private banking house in Hamburg. From 1939 to 1973 he was president of E. M. Warburg, Pincus & Company in New York.

Born in Hamburg on April 15, 1900, Mr. Warburg was educated at the Heinrich Hertz-Realgymnasium in Hamburg, served in the German Army in 1918 and learned the banking business in Berlin, Frankfurt, London and New York.

Awarded Legion of Merit

From 1929 to 1938 he was a managing partner of M. M. Warburg & Company in Hamburg and of Warburg & Company of Amsterdam. A Jew, he fled Germany in 1938 and in World War II served as a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. He was an intelligence officer and took part in the interrogation of leading Nazis, including Hermann Goring.

As the war in Europe drew to a close, he helped arrange for German scientists and their families to be taken to the West. He was awarded the Legion of Merit by the United States, the Order of the British Empire and the Croix de Guerre. He was an ardent proponent of United States reconciliation with Germany and was a founding member of the American Council on Germany in New York. He also served as treasurer of the International Rescue Committee.

He is survived by his wife, the former Dorothea Thorsch; a son, Max, of Hamburg; two daughters, Dr. Marie Warburg of Chestnut Hill, Mass., and Erica Warburg of Hamburg; two sisters, Anita Warburg of Manhattan and Gisela Warburg-Wyzanski of Cambridge, Mass., and four grandchildren.