Oscar Angelo Wassermann's grandfather
Samuel Wassermann (1810–1884) came to Bamberg from Regensburg and opened a bank, A. E. Wassermann, which his son
Emil (1842–1911) and brother Angelo ran after his death. Emil Wassermann married Emma Oppenheimer in
Frankfurt am Main. Their son Oscar was the oldest of nine or ten children; his youngest brother was German banker
Sigmund Wassermann (1889–1958). After completing a training in banking at Munich and Paris, Oscar Wassermann started work at the important
Berlin subsidiary of the family bank in 1889, the year of his mother's death. In 1900 he took over the control of it, jointly with his cousin Max Wassermann (1863–1934). The value of the business undertaken by the Wassermann Bank's Berlin subsidiary soon surpassed that of the head office branch in
Bamberg, largely on account of Oscar Wassermann's profitable
securities trading. Biographers suggest that the relationship between the branch director cousins, Max and Oscar Wassermann, became fractious, however.
After the First World War Wassermann accepted an invitation to become a member of the German Standing Finance Commission, established under the leadership of
Max Warburg. It was intended by the government that the commission should negotiate the post-war financial settlement with the French, British and American governments. It turned out that the foreign governments, for their own domestic reasons, were more interested in crushing a commercial and political rival than in negotiating a financial settlement, and the German Financial Commission had little involvement in the
Versailles negotiations except as a critic. The involvement nevertheless seems to have burnished Wassermann's credentials as an internationally well-connected member of Germany's banking establishment. As a respected Reichsbank board member he exercised significant influence over German monetary policy, especially during the later years of the
German Republic. Meanwhile, in 1922, at the request of
Chancellor Cuno he prepared a report and plan to deal with the crisis created by the unaffordability of the
reparations requirements imposed on Germany at
Versailles in 1919. The
plan foundered, primarily in the face of
French intransigence, although elements of it turned up soon afterwards in the (American)
Dawes Plan, intended to address the same concerns. Between 1923 and 1933 Oscar Wassermann acted as spokesman (
"Sprecher") for the
Deutsche Bank executive board. The term is sometimes translated in English language sources as "CEO", which can be misleading: he was a leading member of the board, but there would have been no question of implementing significant strategic changes without the support of senior colleagues, some of whom made no secret of their objections to his (it was said) autocratic manner, and were also known to give vent to concerns over the extent to which Wassermann's spare time and (by this time very considerable) personal wealth were used on behalf of Jewish organisations. He was succeeded in the role, briefly, by the banker
Georg Solmssen. In 1929, he was a leading figure in the fusion of Deutsche Bank with Berlin's
Disconto-Gesellschaft. The boards of both banks justified the move on the grounds of the "pressures to rationalise" which they faced. Agreement was announced, to widespread astonishment within and beyond the banking establishment, in September 1929 and the merger took effect on Tuesday 29 October 1929, long before the
Great Depression's nature and extent of the backwash in
Germany (and elsewhere) from the
Wall Street crash could be foreseen. His resignation letter proposed he should resign at any time up till the end of 1933. If suitable arrangements for the succession could be made before the end of the year he would be happy to go sooner. There was concern among colleagues that international markets might react adversely to a shock resignation. However, a week later he reported to colleagues that he had suffered "heart spasms" during the night, and family members including notably, one of his brothers reported that his condition was serious. Wassermann was an unusually heavy smoker and he was overweight. It was reasonable to infer that he would be confined to bed for several weeks, and might never recover his full health. Five weeks later, in the middle of May 1933, Wassermann turned up at the bank apparently fully restored. By that time, however, the succession plan that had been conspicuously absent back at the start of April was well advanced. On 29 May 1933 Wassermann's resignation was announced: his apparently amicable and consensual departure was completed well before the end of the year. == Personal ==