Siegmund George Warburg

Sir Siegmund George Warburg (30 September 1902 – 18 October 1982) was a German-born Jewish-English banker. He was a member of the prominent Warburg family. He played a prominent role in the development of merchant banking.

Career

He was born in the village of Seeburg, Germany (today part of Bad Urach), the only child of Georges Siegmund Warburg and his wife, Lucie, who raised young Siegmund on an estate (Uhenfels Castle) in Swabia in South West Germany far away from the main branch of the family, which operated the second largest bank in Hamburg. Siegmund had a sincere and deep affection for his mother who taught him to have a critical and inquisitive mind.

In the period immediately before the Second World War he worked under cover for the Z Organisation, a highly secret offshoot of MI6/SIS, and reported from Switzerland on his regular meetings with Hjalmar Schacht, then the president of the Nazi German Reichsbank and thus the most powerful German banker. He was forced to flee the National Socialist regime of Adolf Hitler and moved to the United Kingdom in 1934 where he co-founded S. G. Warburg & Co. in 1946 with Henry Grunfeld.