Emil Weiler, managing director of the prominent Frankfort banking firm of Jacob Isaac Weiler, which closed its doors on July 22 after having been in business for 136 years, committed suicide today by taking poison. The Weiler bank, which had been a pioneer in financing Germany’s dyeing industry, failed as a direct result of Germany’s financial crisis.
In Jewish circles Herr Weiler’s suicide is seen as the latest indication of the post-war decline of the most important Jewish families in Germany. He is the tenth prominent Jew in the last year to take death as the easiest way out of economic difficulties which are gradually impoverishing Germany Jewry.
Dramatic attention to the problem of the economic impoverishment of people once prominent in German Jewry for their wealth and benefactions was directed late in 1930 by the suicide of Dr. Eduard Simon, cousin and business partner of James Simon, president of the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Jueden. In January of this year Erich Goldschmidt, former head of the Berlin banking house of Joseph Goldschmidt, Inc., and Fritz Steinfeld, another Jewish banker, shot themselves.
Last April, Anna Goldschmidt, her daughter, Martha Valentine, and Toni Weissman, widows of well-known German Jews, died together of gas suffocation in a suicide pact which was blamed on economic troubles. Shortly after Adolf Mannheimer, once the owner of the leading dressmaking firm in Germany, shot himself. The recent closing of the Darmstaedter und National Bank, prompted Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Jaffe, long prominent in Berlin society, to kill themselves.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
