Siegmund Warburg Dead at 80

Sir Siegmund George Warburg, a member of the Warburg investment banking family, and a governor of the Weizmann Institute of Science at Rehovot, died here Monday after a brief illness at the age of 80. He had been visiting London from his home near Lausanne, Switzerland, for medical treatment.

At the time of his death, he also was serving as chairman of the European Committee for the Weizmann Institute, which has offices in Zurich and London. He took an active interest in Israeli affairs and recently voiced disagreement publicly with the policies of the Begin government.

Born in 1902 in Westphalia, he attended the Evangelical Seminary in Urach, the first Jewish student in the seminary’s 450-year history. In 1920, he became a member of M. M. Warburg and Company, founded by his ancestors in 1798, then working for N.M. Rothschild and Sons in London before going to the United States, where he joined an accounting firm in Boston and later joined the banking house of Kuhn Loeb and Co., in New York City.

In 1930, he returned to Hamburg as a partner in the family bank and set up a branch in Berlin in 1931. He publicly protested to the German Foreign Ministry about random arrests of German citizens, particularly Jews. He fled to Britain in 1934, settling in England as a refugee with his Swedish wife, Eva Maria Philipson. He became a British subject in 1939, but spent the last years of his life in Switzerland.