Ludwig Bamberger (22 July 1823 – 14 March 1899) was a German Jewish economist, lawyer, politician, revolutionary and writer. He took part in the German March Revolution (1848) and was condemned to die. He fled to Switzerland. He stayed in exile in England, France and the Netherlands before being pardoned and allowed to return to Germany in 1866. He co-founded Deutsche Bank in 1870 as a specialist bank for foreign trade.
He held a seat in the Reichstag as a proponent of free trade. He had long supported German Unification and Bismark. He was a member of the National Liberal Party a Nationalist organization encouraging unification of a German Empire along with it’s industrialization and the colonization of foreign lands to become powerful. The party became a dominant force after unification in 1871.
Bamberger deserted the National Liberal Party and helped form the German Free Singled Party in opposition to Bismark’s policies. Bamberger’s primary political specialty was economics and he was against protective tariffs.
Bamberger was also frustrated by the intense anti-Semitism of the National Liberal Party against which he always stood his ground.
Karl Marx once said that Ludwig Bamberger could hear the “Gypsy language of the Paris Stock Exchange Synagogue”. His former parliamentary colleague in the National Liberal Party Heinrich von Treitschke, who in 1879 caused a great stir with his article Our Prospects and hardly concealed sympathy for anti-Semitic ideas. Wikipedia
Bamberger died in 1899 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Schönhauser Allee alongside Eduard Lasker. The grave writing reads: “Here rests in death (he who) united the common striving for Germany’s unity and freedom in life.”
Arthur Liebehenschel (25 November 1901 – 24 January 1948) was a German SS commander who was Commandant of Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps during the Holocaust. He studied economics and public administration in university and became a Seargent Major in the Reichswehr. He joined the Nazi party in 1932.
On 1 December 1943, Liebehenschel was appointed commandant of Auschwitz I concentration camp, succeeding Rudolf Höss. While continuing mass executions, he made some minor “improvements” including removing the standing cells and halting the selections to gas chambers among regular prisoners. According to Hermann Langbein, a prisoner at Auschwitz infirmary: “in general one could establish that even those SS members who were very bloodthirsty before became a bit more reserved because they realized that their fanaticism would not necessarily be tolerated anymore.” Wikipedia
His performance at Auschwitz got him appointed Commandant of Majdanek concentration camp; it was already empty. Prisoners had been executed or moved because Soviet forces were advancing in the region.
At the war’s end, Arthur Liebehenschel was arrested by the U.S. Army and extradited to Poland. He was convicted of crimes against humanity at the Auschwitz Trial in Kraków, and hung on 24 January 1948.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad, sometimes given in Latin as Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat (literally: Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason) or Quem Iuppiter vult perdere, dementat prius (literally: Those whom Jupiter wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason) … by way of the old in and out
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