Henry Grunfeld

Grunfeld was born in Breslau in the Prussian Province of Silesia (today Wrocław, Poland) to an assimilated Jewish family with longstanding interests in the steel and chemicals industries. He was educated in Breslau and Berlin. Grunfeld became prominent in the German Steel Industry at the age of just 20 after his father's death forced him to take over the operations of the family steel piping business, A. Niederstetter. He subsequently represented the German Steel Industry in its negotiations with the Weimar government. Later, Grunfeld had to confront critical problems posed by the aftermath of hyperinflation, industrial unrest and world depression following the Wall Street crash of 1929. At the age of 27 he became closely involved in the aftermath of the 1931 banking crisis, serving on more than 20 creditor committees.

In April 1934, following the rise of Hitler, Grunfeld was arrested by the Gestapo without warrant or charge and jailed for fifty-four hours. He was able to use his status as an honorary Consul of Spain to avoid deportation to a concentration camp and fled to London with his family shortly after the Night of the Long Knives. His family business became the subject of Aryanization and was plundered by the Nazis, and after the application of the various Nazi capital flight taxes and exchange controls, almost all Grunfeld's personal assets were also confiscated: he arrived in the United Kingdom with £4,000 (equal to just 7.5% of his company's original book value at the time of its founding in 1898). Many members of his family remained in Germany and were killed during the Third Reich. While Grunfeld was later highly active with post-war German industrial companies, he never returned to Berlin and made no post-war restitution claim.